By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
Yet another legislative session has come and gone without Montana’s politicians coming to an agreement on a comprehensive bill to address the state’s crumbling public infrastructure.
The Montana House of Representatives twice failed to pass the last comprehensive infrastructure bill standing this session Friday morning. Both votes fell three votes shy of the 67 votes needed to pass SB 367, which required a two-thirds majority because the bill would have raised funds to pay for infrastructure improvements through bonding.
With their first vote Friday morning, the bill failed by a vote of 64-35 with one legislator absent. The House then appeared to adjourn, but came back to the floor again and narrowly voted to reconsider the bill one last time. The final vote fell 64-34, with two legislators absent.
The bill actually had its first “final” vote on Thursday, when it was defeated by a vote of 65-35, but House members voted to reconsider it after that vote and put it on the agenda for Friday.
When the bill was voted on Wednesday for its second reading in the House, the vote was 63-37. Between that vote on Wednesday and the first try at final passage on Thursday, four legislators who voted ‘No’ on Wednesday changed their votes to ‘Yes’, but two who voted for the bill on Wednesday changed to no votes on Thursday, helping doom the bill.
The bill’s defeat is particularly bad news for Glendive.
City officials had been lobbying hard for its passage, as the bill would have put more funding into the state’s Treasure State Endowment Program so that the city could secure TSEP funding for a planned $8-10 million renovation of the city’s water treatment plant. The water plant project was not selected to receive TSEP funding by the Department of Commerce when the awards were announced back in December, much to the city’s chagrin, but had SB 367 passed, there would have been funding available for it.
Now, the city is left to pay for the project entirely on its own, Mayor Jerry Jimison complained on Friday after the infrastructure bill’s final defeat. What’s more, it’s not a project the city can ignore or put off for much longer, as the concrete walls of the water plant’s Solids Contact Unit are disintegrating, and Jimison noted that the longer the plant is in operation without being renovated, the more chance there is that it could suffer a catastrophic failure which would leave the city without potable water.
Jimison said that means city residents are liable to have to pay for the water plant renovation without much if any assistance from the state.
“The failure of the infrastructure bill is going to leave the financial burden of upgrading our water and sewer systems back onto the backs of the local users,” Jimison said.
Jimison added that between the infrastructure bill not passing and the 2017 Legislature’s aptitude for slashing budgets for nearly every state-sponsored program in sight, the city will be operating with “no frills” for the next couple of years.
“We will just be scrambling to try to fund the needed projects and keep us going and hope our sons and daughters and grandkids will do well enough to be able to pay for all the infrastructure we won’t be getting done,” Jimison said.
Also losing out with the infrastructure bill’s defeat are the Buffalo Rapids Irrigation District No. 1 and Makoshika State Park. SB 367 contained $125,000 in funding for upgrades to Buffalo Rapids’ irrigation system and was amended earlier this week to add $1.5 million to construct a potable water line into Makoshika and a new campground and campground facilities to go with it.
Local Rep. Alan Doane said, however, that he believes the loss for Buffalo Rapids is the greater of the two. Doane said that though he fought to get the funding for Makoshika included, he had come to understand that the interim director of Montana State Parks had no intention to pursue construction of the water line and campground even if the bill had passed so as not to run afoul of Gov. Steve Bullock.
“I don’t know that we can call that one a loss if he wasn’t going to pursue it to do it,” Doane said of the Makoshika funding.
Another local loser as the session ended was the Dry-Redwater Regional Water Authority, which lost a potential $3 million when a separate infrastructure bonding bill for rural water projects, HB 8, also went down in flames Friday morning right before the Legislature adjourned.
Doane, who voted against the infrastructure bill during the 2015 session which failed by a single vote on the final day, voted for this infrastructure bill every time it came before the House, even though it contained more funds raised through the sale of bonds than the 2015 bill did. He said his reason for doing so and supporting a bill that contained bonding, which he has generally opposed in the past, was simple — it would have brought a lot of money back to Dawson and Wibaux counties for infrastructure projects.
“If you look at all the total projects that were in there, 10 percent of the money was coming to our district,” Doane said.
In the end though, just as in previous sessions, House leaders could not whip up enough votes amongst Republican members who remain staunchly opposed to bonding to clear the two-thirds majority required.
“I’ve run a lot of wild horses in my life, and you make your best run at them and sometimes you come up short, and we came up a little short,” Doane said, adding he doesn’t know that anything could have been done differently to secure the couple of more votes that were needed to pass the infrastructure bill.
For Jimison and other local officials, the failure is another bitter pill they must swallow in what has become a long line of them. Jimison said it was “disheartening” when it became apparent Friday morning that for the fourth straight legislative session, no infrastructure bill made it out of the Legislature or past the governor’s desk.
“We come away shut out again and the citizens of Glendive and Dawson County are the losers,” Jimison said. “All I can say is, maybe someday.”
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.