Legislative Watch

2009 Legislative Report & Scorecard

Click here for our full report on property-rights legislative action in 2009, including scores for individual legislators based on their own votes.






Property rights and public policy

UPOM maintains a full-time presence at the Montana legislature and monitors public policy developments during the legislative interim. In addition, UPOM works to educate legislators on property rights issues, and gets involved on a limited basis in legislative elections in order to elect public officials most conducive to protecting private property rights.



2009 Legislative Session Highlights

UPOM was involved with numerous bills in the 2009 legislative session, and though we didn't win on every issue, we do consider the overall result of the session to be positive for property rights. Here are some of the highlights:

  • We supported two bills aimed at reducing the impacts of the state (particularly FWP) buying up large acreages of land from private landowners. SB 435 (Brenden, R-Scobey) would have prohibited a net gain in state ownership of land, in other words after purchasing 1,000 acres of land, the state would have to sell another 1,000 acres. The bill was passed by the Senate, but died on a tie vote in the House Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Committee. The second bill, SB 164 (Barrett, R-Dillon), was dubbed the "good neighbor policy", and requires the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks to set aside into a maintenance fund 20% above the purchase price of any new property they buy. SB 164 also requires more attention to weed management on FWP properties. SB 164 passed both houses of the legislature with strong support.

  • UPOM worked on three bills aimed at improving the management of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. SB 31 (Bales, R-Otter) would have required that one of the five FWP Commissioners be a landowner with a minimum of 1,000 acres. We supported this concept due to the complicated land-purchasing deals FWP has been involved with in recent years, and to place someone on the Commission with first-hand knowledge of the sportsman-landowner relationship from the landowner perspective. This bill passed the Senate but died on a tie vote in the House FWP Committee. SB 162 (Barrett, R-Dillon) would have clarified that the FWP Commission must use biological game management in setting permit numbers in order to prevent them from using the big game permit system to punish landowners. The bill would have also maximized hunting opportunity for sportsmen. The bill died on the Senate floor 26-24. SB 163 (Barrett, R-Dillon) would have closed a loophole in state law that allows FWP to make sweeping hunting permit decisions without first conducting an economic impact statement to determine the impact they could have on local economies; this bill died in the Senate Fish and Game committee on a close vote.

  • We supported SB 402, a bill designed to address the problems highlighted by the Montana Supreme Court's December 31, 2008 decision in the alternative livestock lawsuit. That decision established a very liberal interpretation of what constitutes "property" in a takings case; things like business licenses and a businesses ability to stay in business can be taken through government action without compensation. UPOM was joined by a broad coalition of business groups in support of this bill. The bill passed the Senate with bi-partisan support, but was killed by Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee.

  • UPOM was instrumental in amending HB 190, the stream access bill, to provide adequate protection for landowners. The amendments we proposed included adding liability protection, preventing the expansion of recreational access at prescriptive easements, and preventing the certain types of ordinary fences from being made illegal. The original form of the bill was incredibly one-sided, but UPOM joined the Montana Stockgrowers and Citizens for Balanced Use in amending the bill to include property rights protections without sacrificing access. The bill in the end was a win-win for landowners and sportsmen alike.

  • One of the bad bills that UPOM helped to kill (but that we fear may come back next time) was HB 314, the so-called "elk harboring" bill. Disguised as a way to mitigate the damage done to private land by elk, this bill set up a mechanism whereby neighboring landowners, special interest groups, or even individual hunters could accuse a property owner of "harboring" wildlife. The remedies for harboring included a number of mitigation strategies imposed on the landowner by FWP, including opening the property up to unlimited hunting without permission. Simply put, this bill was an attempt to force public access on private land with FWP as the facilitator. The bill was supported by the Wildlife Federation and sponsored by Rep. Kendall Van Dyke of Billings. The bill was tabled unanimously by the House FWP Committee.

  • A couple of other bills of note that UPOM was involved with included HB 455, which would have prohibited landowners from building anything within a 250 foot buffer zone from the high water mark fo many Montana waterways. UPOM opposed this bill, which died on a tie vote in the House Local Government committee. We supported SBs 465, 500, and 507, which combined to clarify problems created by the Montana Department of Revenue last year after they took a liberal interpretation of a state district court's decision in the PPL streambed lawsuit. DOR mailed hundreds of Montana landowners to inform them that they no longer owned their streambed property, even though in most cases the rivers or streams in question had not been determined "navigable" by a court (in which case they would belong to the state). All three bills passed with strong bipartisan support.


Legislative Elections

UPOM participates in legislative elections in order to educate both the electorate and potential elected officials on issues important to property owners. In 2008 we released a candidate survey as a means to allow the public to review candidate positions on several issues: