2025 Legislature reaches halfway point: what's been done
Legislators have voted forward bills on property tax relief, Medicaid expansion, judicial oversight and more
Hey savvy news reader! Thanks for choosing local.
You are now reading
1 of 3 free articles.
Legislators have voted forward bills on property tax relief, Medicaid expansion, judicial oversight and more.
The Montana Legislature eased into its mid-session transmittal break Friday, offering the body’s Republican majority and Democratic minority a chance to trumpet their accomplishments at the Capitol over the first half of this year’s legislative session.
Republicans, who hold 32 of 50 seats in the Senate and 58 of 100 seats in the House, have touted work advancing bills to give Montanans residential property tax relief, address the high cost of housing, adjust regulations around energy development and limit access to abortion. They’ve also championed a slate of measures aimed at addressing alleged judicial activism in the state court system.
“Montanans expect action, not excuses. And that’s exactly what House Republicans are delivering,” Speaker of the House Brandon Ler, R-Savage, said in a Friday video statement.
Democrats picked up 10 House and two Senate seats in last year’s elections — in part as a result of newly redrawn legislative districts. They said Friday that those additional seats have given them more negotiating power so far this year, aiding Democratic priorities like passing a GOP-sponsored bill to renew Montana’s expanded Medicaid over opposition from some Republicans and keeping House Republicans from voting down Democratic property tax bills.
At a Friday press conference, Democrats also touted success moving forward bills addressing education and housing funding, as well as knocking down Republican proposals they believe trample on personal liberties around abortion and gender.
“We’ve been able to do a lot more with policy, and we’ve kept alive and we’ve advanced a lot more things this time around,” said House Minority Leader Katie Sullivan, D-Missoula.
Democratic priorities have at times also benefited from a divided Republican Senate majority that has been at times distracted by contracting scandals involving former Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton and current Senate President Matt Regier, R-Kalispell. As other lawmakers packed up to go home for the break Friday, the Senate Ethics Committee stayed in the Capitol to hold its first investigatory meeting into Ellsworth.
The transmittal milestone represented the deadline for most non-spending or revenue bills to clear at least one of the Legislature’s two chambers. Bills that have passed either the House or the Senate will now face a second round of scrutiny in the other chamber, ultimately passing to the governor’s desk if they can secure support on both sides of the Legislature.
The Senate expects to resume for the second half of the session on Friday, March 14 and the House plans to return to the Capitol on Monday, March 17.
Here’s a roundup of where notable legislation stands at the midway point. Bills that ✅ are advancing or ❌ have been voted down so far this session include the following:
PROPERTY TAX RELIEF
✅ House Bill 231, sponsored by Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, and backed by Gov. Greg Gianforte, would rework the state’s property tax system to lower taxes on primary residences, minimizing the ensuing tax shift onto non-residential properties by raising taxes on second homes and Airbnb-style short-term rentals. It has passed the House and has been referred to the Senate Taxation Committee.
✅ House Bill 155 and ✅ House Bill 154 are Democratic-sponsored alternatives to the governor’s property tax proposal. HB 155 would rework the tax system similarly to the governor’s proposal but focus on raising taxes for higher-value homes and lowering them for lower-value ones without regard to ownership status. HB 154 would create an income tax credit to help homeowners and renters offset the cost of property taxes. Both measures have passed the House.
✅ Senate Bill 90 would lower property taxes by diverting some lodging tax money to annual property tax credits. It has passed the Senate.
HEALTH CARE
✅ House Bill 245 would lift the 2025 sunset on Montana’s Medicaid expansion program program, which covers health care costs for low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years old. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Ed Buttrey, R-Great Falls, continues the program that Montana lawmakers first approved in 2015. It has cleared both chambers and is en route to the governor’s desk.
❌House Bill 565, a bill to require health care insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization, narrowly failed to pass second reading in the House on a 47-52. The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Ed Stafman, D-Bozeman, generated substantial debate over infertility treatments, health care access, adoption and lawmakers’ moral qualms about disposing of unused embryos created through IVF.
JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT
✅ House Bill 39, which repeals a ban on political parties contributing to candidates, was signed by the governor.
✅ Senate Bill 42 would make Montana’s judicial elections partisan campaigns like other statewide offices. It cleared the Senate and is now in the House.
❌ House Bill 36 would have disallowed a judge from being the chair of the Judicial Standards Commission. It passed the House but was voted down in the Senate.
❌ Senate Bill 16, which would have empowered the Legislature to hold noncompliant people subpoenaed by the Legislature in contempt, was withdrawn by its sponsor.
HOUSING
✅ House Bill 311 would require property managers to refund rental application fees to unsuccessful applicants when those fees aren’t used for purposes like credit checks. Sponsored by Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, the measure was initially voted down by the House Judiciary Committee, but was revived and passed by the full House 67-32.
Several bills aiming to increase the supply of housing available to Montana renters and buyers by limiting local zoning regulations are advancing. Among them are ✅ Senate Bill 266, sponsored by Sen. Jeremy Trebas, R-Great Falls, which would require cities of 5,000 people or more to allow fourplex housing on all residential lots, and ✅ House Bill 492, sponsored by Rep. Katie Zolnikov, R-Billings, which limit how much parking cities can require as part of new residential or commercial developments. Both bills have passed their first chamber.
LABOR ISSUES
❌ Senate Bill 376, which would have established right-to-work provisions, was voted down in committee and failed a subsequent blast motion where its sponsor, Sen. Mark Noland, R–Bigfork, tried to resurrect it for debate on the Senate floor. The bill’s demise marked the third defeat this session of legislation that would have weakened the power of organized labor.
❌ House Bill 484, which would have set Montana’s minimum wage at $12.06, an increase from the the current rate of $10.55, failed on a party-line committee vote with Republican opposition. The bill was brought by Rep. Kelly Kortum, D–Bozeman.
INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS
✅ Senate Bill 311 requires the state director of Indian affairs to provide information and training opportunities to lawmakers about Indian law, the history of federal Indian policy and legal rights of tribal members. Sen. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, proposed similar legislation last session, but that bill died early in the process. The bill cleared the Senate in a 45-5 vote.
✅ House Bill 545 changes the name of the state Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Advisory Council. It would remove the Montana Highway Patrol representative from the body and add a homicide investigator. While the task force currently makes recommendations to the Legislature and to tribes, the bill would also enable the task force to make recommendations to relevant federal agencies. HB 545 cleared the House Tuesday in a 98-1 vote.
❌ Senate Bill 526, to bolster Montana’s community health aide program, died. Run by the federal Indian Health Service, the community health aide program trains and certifies providers in tribal communities. SB 526 would have established a grant program for tribal colleges to expand their education offerings related to that initiative, which proponents argued would promote workforce development and improve access to care in tribal communities. Bill sponsor Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, said he plans to strengthen the bill before reintroducing it in a future legislative session.
EDUCATION AND CHILD CARE
✅ House Bill 567 enables school districts to adopt countywide resource-sharing agreements in a bid to reduce program and service costs for individual public schools. The measure, sponsored by Rep. Brad Barker, R-Red Lodge, passed the House with strong bipartisan support just prior to the transmittal cut-off and is among several Republican-led proposals aimed at easing financial burdens weighing on local district budgets throughout the state. HB 567 also creates state-funded incentives for districts to enter into such agreements, with a fiscal note estimating a total annual cost to state coffers of $5 million.
✅ House Bill 338 seeks to build on the 2023 session’s passage of early literacy interventions for preschool-aged children by adding early numeracy to the program. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Melissa Romano, D-Helena, emerged from conversations among lawmakers and state education leaders last year about lagging math scores among Montana’s public school students. HB 338 passed out of the House Education Committee and across the House floor in mid-February with near-unanimous support and has already been referred to the Senate Education and Cultural Resources Committee. The proposal is one of two measures aimed at amending the 2023 early literacy law to include early math interventions. The other — ✅ House Bill 628, sponsored by Rep. Melissa Nikolakakos, R-Great Falls — made it through the House just ahead of transmittal with mixed support from Republicans and Democrats.
❌ House Bill 320, better known this session as the MAPPS, for Montana Academic Prosperity Program for Scholars, bill, proposes a voluntary tax credit program to reimburse Montana parents for educational expenses incurred outside the public school system. It emerged early on as one of the primary measures in 2025 to advance the school choice movement, with the national nonprofit EdChoice assisting requester Rep. Sue Vinton, R-Billings, in the bill drafting process. It also echoed a similar effort this year in Idaho. After spirited debates in committee and on the House floor, Montana lawmakers narrowly rejected the bill on a 45-55 vote.
✅ Senate Bill 525 opens the door for Montana public schools to employ paid or volunteer school chaplains, and would allow districts to engage such services in lieu of employing a school counselor. The bill appeared in committee days ahead of the transmittal deadline, with sponsor Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, framing it as an attempt to further address Montana’s growing youth mental health crisis. Statewide education associations and mental health professionals balked, questioning the bill’s lean qualifications for chaplains and the potential impacts on in-school mental health supports particularly in districts with tight budgets. SB 525 quickly advanced to the Senate floor, where it passed with support from the chamber’s full Republican caucus as well as Sen. Dave Fern, D-Whitefish.
❌ Senate Bill 269 and ❌ Senate Bill 285 constitute a combined effort on the part of Republicans to revise state regulations for child care facilities. Both were sponsored by Sen. Dennis Lenz, R-Billings, who tethered the policies to an interim dispute between lawmakers and the Department of Public Health and Human Services over the agency’s recent rewrite of those regulations. Lenz argued the process ignored legislative input and cautioned that if the Legislature didn’t act in passing his bills, the disputed new rules would go into effect at the close of the current session. DPHHS leaders and child care advocates countered that if approved, the proposals threatened to put Montana out of compliance with federal health and safety requirements. SB 269 and SB 285 failed to clear the Senate floor days before transmittal, facing opposition from a coalition of Democrats and Republicans.
House Bill 252, colloquially referred to as the STARS Act, is arguably the most high-profile piece of education policy to appear this session. The bill aims to tackle statewide teacher recruitment and retention woes by tweaking Montana’s public school funding formula, expanding the types of licensed positions that qualify for specific state payments through that formula and doubling the amount of those payments to drive up starting teacher pay. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte flagged $100 million in his proposed budget to underwrite the effort, and the proposal is being shepherded by one of the Legislature’s most seasoned shapers of public K-12 funding, Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee. The STARS Act has found substantial support on both sides of the aisle so far, clearing the House floor on an 88-9 vote, and will debut in the Senate after the transmittal break.
ABORTION
❌ House Bill 609 to prohibit abortion “trafficking” and ❌House Bill 555 to restrict medication abortions were tabled in the House Judiciary Committee at the Republican sponsor’s request after two intense days of back-to-back hearings.
The House Judiciary Committee also rejected ❌ House Bill 228, a “fatherhood at conception” bill to allow for paternity testing and child support payments during pregnancy.
❌ House Bill 565 was shut down by House lawmakers. It would have required private health insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization. The Democratic-sponsored proposal sparked emotional debate about the costs of infertility treatments, what the Legislature can do to support families, and whether some of the components of IVF violated some lawmakers’ convictions about life beginning at conception.
✅ Senate Bill 319, another Democratic-backed bill to add coverage for doula services to the state Medicaid package, was tabled in a Senate public health committee but later successfully blasted onto the Senate floor with bipartisan support. It passed an initial Senate floor vote 32-18 vote, but still has a finance committee review and a final floor vote to clear in the Senate.
LGBTQ+ ISSUES
A stack of bills about gender identity, the public rights of transgender people, and other LGBTQ+ related issues have mostly have passed along party lines, including ✅ Senate Bill 164 to create a felony for parents and other adults who “procures or provides” gender transition-related treatments for trans minors under 16.
✅ House Bill 121, would strictly segregate public bathroom and changing room use based on a person’s chromosomes and reproductive biology. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, prompted early-session debates over public restrictions for transgender people and was heavily opposed by LGBTQ+ rights advocates. Proponents said the bill would protect cisgender women from discomfort or harassment by transgender women or male predators who pretend to be women. It has passed both chambers and is headed to the governor’s desk.
❌ Senate Joint Resolution 15 asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 gay marriage ruling died in committee on a tie vote.
❌ House Bill 675 to create new restrictions for drag performances died on second reading in the House in a 44-55 vote.
❌ House Bill 754 is another failed proposal would have opened up parents to a child welfare investigation if they generally supported a child’s gender transition. That proposal, sponsored by Rep. Lukas Schubert, R-Kalispell, died in a 27-71 vote on the House floor.
✅House Bill 682 cleared the House after being amended. As initially introduced, the bill would have created a 25-year statute of limitations for patients to sue medical providers for gender transition-related care, but that’s now down to a four-year lawsuit window.
✅ Senate Bill 437 passed the Senate on party lines. It seeks to define “sex,” “male,” “female,” “father,” “mother” and other terms based on a person’s reproductive biology. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Carl Glimm, R-Kila, strikes and replaces the language and definitions from a 2023 law recently ruled unconstitutional by a state district court judge.
ENVIRONMENT
✅ Senate Bill 221, specifies how state agencies like the Montana Department of Environmental Quality should inventory greenhouse gas emissions to comply with the Held v. Montana youth climate ruling the Montana Supreme Court upheld late last year. In addition to specifying that the bill is not intended to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — only inventory them — it bars the state from considering emissions associated with the transport and out-of-state combustion of fossil fuels extracted in Montana. Sponsored by Sen. Wylie Galt, R-Martinsdale, it cleared the Senate on a 37-13 vote.
✅ House Bill 285 sponsored by House Speaker Brandon Ler, R-Savage, passed the House on a party-line vote with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed. HB 285 revises the Montana Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law dating to 1971, to restrict project opponents’ access to legal remedies. The bill was lauded by industry groups for adding “certainty” to the law and opposed by environmental groups, who argue that it weakens the public’s ability to influence the trajectory of projects with significant environmental consequences.
✅ House Bill 291, a measure by Rep. Greg Oblander, R-Billings, that includes a long list of Republican co-sponsors, seeks to bar the state from passing air quality standards stricter than those in federal laws like the Clean Air Act. It passed through the House with three Democrats voting for the measure alongside all of the chamber’s Republicans. Opponents argue it will prevent the state from restricting greenhouse gas emissions — a recent development tied to the Held ruling — since only one greenhouse gas, methane, is currently regulated at the federal level.
WATER
⌛ Senate Bill 358, a proposal overhauling how the Department of Natural Resources regulates groundwater wells exempted from the water rights permitting process, appears to have squeaked through the transmittal deadline with an amendment tagging a fiscal element to the bill. Shortly after a marathon hearing on the bill, Senate Natural Resources put an amendment on SB 358 at the request of bill sponsor and committee chair Wylie Galt, R-Martinsdale. The amendment gives the Senate another month to work on the proposal before it faces a separate transmittal deadline for a bill with financial elements.
A competing exempt well proposal by Sen. Carl Glimm, R-Kila, is a bit further along in the process. An amended version of the bill garnered bipartisan support in a 27-23 vote through the Senate. ✅ Senate Bill 436 increases the appropriation for exempt wells so larger parcels of land can receive larger groundwater appropriations.
House Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, sponsored ✅ House Bill 685 striking laws pertaining to the “nondegradation” of high-quality waters. Instead of specifying that DEQ can’t authorize the degradation of such waters, the law would read that DEQ could not allow a reduction in water quality through a “feasibility analysis,” a term that remains undefined in the bill. Fitzpatrick argues there are other overarching protections under existing state and federal law that would still apply, while opponents counter that it rolls back a long track record of river and lake protection under the Montana Water Quality Act.
ENERGY
❌House Bill 389, sponsored by House Speaker Brandon Ler, R-Savage, would have required wind turbines to be placed 1.5 miles from neighboring properties without a wind lease agreement. Supporters said it would limit wind developments’ impact on neighboring landowners. Opponents countered it would “kill” otherwise viable wind projects. It was tabled by the House Energy, Technology and Federal Relations Committee.
Similarly, a proposal by Sen. Bob Phalen, R-Glendive, restricting new wind turbine towers to 350 feet and barring them from being “excessively lit” failed to clear the Senate Energy, Technology and Federal Relations Committee. Two days after tabling ❌ Senate Bill 283, the committee nixed another of Phalen’s bills: ❌ Senate Bill 505, which sought to allow 55% of residents in a given zoning district to halt wind energy development in the district.
✅ Senate Bill 188, which establishes a framework for community solar power projects, cleared the Senate. Sen. Christopher Pope, D-Bozeman, sponsored the bill, which he argued would reduce participants’ power bills, increase grid reliability, and add new sources of power generation onto a grid badly requiring additional power. It garnered 20 proponents and is opposed by Montana’s two regulated utilities, NorthWestern Energy and Montana-Dakota Utilities.
Rep. Gary Parry, R-Colstrip, has made nuclear energy a priority this session, and a pair of proposals he sponsored easily cleared the House this week. ✅ House Bill 696 establishes “legislative approval” for uranium enrichment in the state to signal Montana’s desire for nuclear energy development here. Six Democrats joined all of the House’s Republicans in supporting the bill. An amendment seeking to require consultation with nearby tribal governments narrowly failed. A similar amendment — this one successful — was added to ✅ House Bill 623, which garnered support from the vast majority of the Legislature’s Republicans and Democrats. HB 623 establishes the Legislature’s approval for the siting of nuclear waste associated with power generation.
WILDLIFE
✅ House Bill 176, a proposal by Rep. Shannon Maness, R-Dillon, would allow hunters and trappers an unlimited number of wolf tags so long as the statewide population remains above 550 animals, roughly half the state’s current population per FWP estimates. It passed out of the Senate with two Republicans joining all the chamber’s Democrats in opposition.
A similarly-themed proposal by Lukas Schubert, R-Kalispell, did not pass the House. ❌ House Bill 222 sought to create an open season for wolf hunting (with an exception for denning and whelping in May and June) until the statewide wolf population fell below 650 wolves.
A proposal directing FWP to create a report on hunter satisfaction addressing the friction between resident and nonresident hunters and a growing trend of private land leased to outfitters and individual hunters, sailed through the House. ✅ House Bill 568 brought by Rep. Courtenay Sprunger, R-Kalispell, advanced through the House with a lone lawmaker, Mike Vinton, R-Billings, in opposition.
Mara Silvers, Tom Lutey, Zeke Lloyd, Nora Mabie, Alex Sakariassen, Amanda Eggert, Eric Dietrich and Kaiden Forman-Webster contributed reporting.
