Montana’s counties are taking a proactive stance on property tax concerns by formally requesting clarity and accountability from the Montana Department of Revenue (DOR). In letters addressed to the Department, Beaverhead, Carbon, Carter, Custer, Lincoln, Missoula, Park, and Ravalli counties have asked that DOR provide the calculation limiting the State’s 95 statewide mills, as well as identification of who is responsible for authorizing property tax increases beyond the statutory limitations.

The recent communication with DOR comes on the heels of an unanswered request from Beaverhead County to Montana’s Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, seeking an opinion on the interpretation of laws related to the calculation of the statewide mills, which significantly impact property tax bills for constituents throughout Montana. According to the request, the State of Montana has consistently levied 95 mills annually, despite a provision in Montana law (Montana Code Annotated 15-10-420) that requires a reduction in levying authority when taxable values increase.

This move by the counties underscores their commitment to transparency and responsible fiscal management, emphasizing the importance of local government control in property tax levies. Montana’s counties seek to ensure that property tax increases are justified, understood, and in line with the needs and expectations of Montana’s residents.

To help show that counties are holding property taxes in line while the State increases them, the Montana Association of Counties (MACo) calculated property tax changes for Governor Gianforte’s private mansion in Helena.

“Surprisingly, his taxes will DECREASE year over year because his appraised value only increased 7.59%,” stated Mineral County Commissioner Roman Zylawy. “The limitations on local government result in a decreased tax burden for his home, with the exception of the State levies which haven’t followed the statutory limitations that cities and counties must follow.”

According to MACo’s calculations, the total property tax for the Governor’s Helena home in 2022 was $7,837.15; whereas in 2023, it is projected to be $7,407.55, which is a decrease of $429.60. Overall, Governor Gianforte’s taxes went down, but his state property taxes increased 8%. The City of Helena taxes went down 4%; Lewis & Clark County went down 11%; local school levies down 4%; and county voted levies down 13%.

“We think this is a perfect example highlighting the need for consistency, transparency, and fairness in property tax calculations,” said Beaverhead County Commissioner Mike McGinley. “It clearly shows that the reduction is due to local governments adhering to our statutory mill levy limitations, and the sole increase in his property taxes exists in only those mills collected by the State, which are within the control of the Governor’s Office.” 

“Montana counties are committed to addressing property tax concerns promptly, reiterating their dedication to responsible spending, essential services provision, and keeping property taxes as low as possible for their residents,” stated Fergus County Commissioner Ross Butcher. “They are calling on the state to follow their lead in maintaining transparency and fiscal responsibility in property tax calculations.”

Underscoring the fiscal responsibility of counties, Custer County Commissioner Jason Strouf said, “Over the years, Custer County has provided cost-of-living wage increases for our valued employees. We have built infrastructure utilizing existing revenue.  We have only one voter-approved general obligation bond which was to build a new detention center that holds both the State and the County inmates. This year, again, our mills are decreasing, and we have balanced our budget while following the requirements of MCA 15-10-420.”

Liberty County Commissioner Joette Woods agrees, stating, “Liberty County believes in transparency at all levels of government.  Our county has seen minimal taxable increases and high inflation rates.  Yet, we rise to the challenge and continue to be fiscally responsible with no new money.”

“At the end of the day, we, as counties, are committed to following the law,” said McGinley. “We are simply asking the State and the Governor’s Office to do the same and to do what is right for the people of Montana.”

— “they only block the sun.”

by Evelyn Pyburn

Just because it’s not likely to get nearly the public recognition that opposition views routinely get, this editorial is to emphasize two news reports about how much we should be concerned about global warming.

Not so much, it seems. Certainly, not so much that we should give up heat, food and life as we know it. And, most certainly, not enough to give up our freedom to choose how we want to live.

The Epoch Times reports focus on the fact that global warming is not the “settled science” that we are frequently told. There are in fact a lot of very smart people who have other points of view… they just don’t get much of a platform to say so.

We have all witnessed it– the media and politicians call them “climate deniers” and ridicule them to a degree that most people with doubts or questions learn to say nothing, which is exactly the purpose.

Following the end of the recent court case of children suing the state for denying them a clean environment, there were articles in which advocates gloated that so successful has the terrorization been, that the state’s attorneys never once even suggested that there might be doubt about the veracity of global warming claims.

One of those “deniers” is a 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate, John Clauser, who has pointed out that the hysteria about supposed climate warming is at the very least hugely overstated, if not outright deceitful. Clauser is not only a Nobel Prize recipient for his contributions to quantum mechanics, he holds degrees from Caltech and Columbia University, and served in roles at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was honored with a portion of the Wolf Prize in Physics.

But more than that, he has read climate change research, which brought him to conclude that those living in fear of becoming crispy critters are “misguided” because researchers  have ignored a key variable, an oversight he calls “sloppy science.”

There is no “climate emergency,” says Clauser, as do another 1600 educated professionals who signed the World Climate Declaration organized by Climate Intelligence, which says “climate change science is not conclusive, and that the earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.”

After studying the research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society, Clauser says the scientists “miss the mark on the critical role of clouds in the climate system.” He says, “cloud cover has a profound effect on the earth’s heat input… clouds are reflecting a massive amount of light back out into space.”

Clouds! What could be more obvious about weather? It’s hard to believe they could be overlooked.

Clauser stated, “As a physicist, I’d worked at some excellent institutions— Caltech, Columbia, Cal Berkeley—where very careful science needed to be done. And reading these reports, I was appalled at how sloppy the work was. And in particular, it was very obvious, even in the earliest reports, and all carried on through to the present, that clouds were not at all understood. … It’s just simply bad science.” 

Clauser referenced a book by Obama’s science advisor, Steve Koonin, in which Koonin noted the inconsistency of the IPCC’s 40 computer models, emphasizing their inability to explain the past century’s climate and suggesting that these models lack a crucial piece of physics.

Clauser said that Al Gore in his film, “The Inconvenient Truth”— “insists on talking about a cloud-free earth. . . That’s a totally artificial Earth.” Clauser said that satellite images show that clouds can cover “five to 95 percent of the Earth’s surface.. . The cloud cover fraction fluctuates quite dramatically on daily -weekly timescales.”

Clouds regulate the Earth’s temperature, serving as a “cloud-sunlight-reflectivity thermostat” that “controls the climate, controls the temperature of the earth, and stabilizes it very powerfully and very dramatically,” asserts Clauser. With two-thirds of the Earth being oceanic, the ocean becomes instrumental in cloud formation.

The article reports: Minimal clouds result in heightened sunlight exposure to the ocean, triggering increased evaporation and subsequent cloud formation, resulting in more clouds. .. abundant clouds reduce this sunlight, thus curbing evaporation rates and cloud formation, resulting in fewer clouds …This balance acts like a natural thermostat for the earth’s temperature…and has a vastly greater influence on Earth’s temperature than the effect of CO2 or methane… “this cloud-reflectivity mechanism might overshadow CO2’s influence by more than 100 or even 200 times.”

Koonin’s book reads that just a 5 percent rise in cloud cover can largely counterbalance the temperature effect of doubling atmospheric CO2. 

Clauser stated that this oversight, “is a rather egregious breach of honesty by the U.S. government by NOAA, . . . This worry about CO2, the worry about methane, the worry about global warming, is all a total fabrication by shocked journalists and or dishonest politicians.”

Clauser is not alone in his views.

The Global Climate Intelligence Group’s “World Climate Declaration” has been signed by 1,609 scientists and informed professionals, who say far more blatantly that “the ‘climate emergency’ is a farce.” When asked why they signed the statement “they all stated a variation of ‘because it’s true,’” reported Epoch Times.

The declaration’s signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide.

“I signed the declaration because I believe the climate is no longer studied scientifically. Rather, it has become an item of faith,” Haym Benaroya, a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers University.

Ralph Alexander, a retired physicist and author  of “Science Under Attack”, said, “The earth has warmed about 2 degrees F since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but that hardly constitutes an emergency—or even a crisis—since the planet has been warmer yet over the last few millennia.”

Edwin Berry, a theoretical physicist and certified consulting meteorologist, said “public perception of carbon dioxide is that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there. They think it just accumulates. But it doesn’t.” He said carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years. And, while we are led to believe that human activity contributes about one-third of the total, it is only 5 to 7 percent. In explanation, IPCC claims that the CO2 humans emit is different from that which nature emits and the human CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

But, a human carbon dioxide molecule is exactly identical to a natural carbon dioxide molecule.

“The belief that human CO2 drives the CO2 increase may be the biggest public delusion and most costly fraud in history,” Berry said. He said the deception is all about money and control.

“All climate model predictions have been wrong,” claims Benaroya. He said that the “push” to declare a climate emergency is about “”power and money, but also larger political forces.”

As for the United Nations’ push for net-zero CO2 by 2050, Alexander said: “It’s a complete waste of time and resources and may well impoverish many Western economies. China and India are not playing along in any case, which makes the whole effort meaningless.”

Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology and the Alfred P. Sloan professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that the issue was never one of science but of politics. He says, “The only purpose of the policies is to make the society poorer. And if you’re poorer, you’re less resilient. So if you believe CO2 is an existential threat and your policies are doing nothing to prevent it but are making you less resilient, one would have to ask, are you a pathological sadist?”

The article quotes dozens of noted scientists, all of whom express doubts about global warming predictions – and be assured you have probably never seen any of their names in any media, especially not to the degree of Al Gore, who is no scientist at all.

Said one scientist, “the claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming isn’t truthful.”

When asked what concerns him most about the current narrative, Larry Bell, an architect known for designing and crafting inhabitable buildings for space, and an endowed professor at the University of Houston, said “I care about how climate hysteria, and how misinformation, drives policy. And these policies are driving our foundational bedrock policies that determine our economic well-being. They determine our national defense mastery—we won’t run a Navy on ethanol. We’re not going to run an Air Force on extension cords. It’s just absolutely insane. People think of climate as science. No, it’s not. It’s the big lever of government. It’s big globalism. And it ain’t favoring the U.S.”

Even if there is a “climate emergency” we as individual citizens need our freedom to deal with it – unless you trust your life to our political leadership, because that is where we are headed.