19 April 2019 — 0834 mdt
Did Montana’s Democrats sell Northwestern Energy’s
ratepayers down the river for money to build a museum?
Something dirty went down in Helena yesterday. The Billings Gazette’s fine reporter, Tom Lutey, has the story. It’s a must read.
Late Tuesday, SB-331, Sen.Tom Richmond’s sweetheart bill for Northwestern Energy, was killed on its third reading in the MT House. Yesterday, the MT House rejected the MT Senate’s amendments to HB-597, a bill addressing utility regulation. That vote sent HB-597 to a conference committee, opening the possibility that the conferees will exhume parts of SB-331 and, Frankenstein fashion, insert them in HB-597.
According to Lutey:
Several Democrats, roughly a third of a caucus, that had earlier opposed Richmond’s bill, voted for the bill key to keeping the “save Colstrip” plan alive.
In a meeting before the vote, House Democrats discussed the possibility of keeping the Colstrip plan in play in exchange for Republican help reviving a tax increase to fund the Montana Historical Society’s long-coveted Heritage Center project. The possibility was floated by House Democratic leadership as one of many narratives going around, that included the support from the governor’s office, members of the caucus told The Gazette.
Democrats hope to raise taxes on hotel rooms in order to fund the Heritage Center in Helena, the historic Moss Mansion in Billings, and the Daly Mansion in Hamilton. The bill was tabled earlier in the House Taxation Committee.
Upending utility regulation in Montana, and gouging Northwestern’s ratepayers to protect the company’s stockholders from the risks of capitalism, is far too high a price to pay for immediate funding for a heritage center that might be nice to have but that Montana can live without for decades if necessary.
The deal not only sells good policy and 370,000 ratepayers down the Powder River for 30 pieces of coal, it condemns Democratic candidates in 2020 to running on two rotten planks: “We raised your taxes, and we helped Northwestern raise your electricity rates for power you might never receive.”
Some commentators and politicians are arguing this is just politics as usual and nothing to get upset about. Balderdash! It’s politics as usual, all right, but that’s an indictment, not a defense.