Montana Labor Department details Employment Standards Division priorities, consolidation plans and technology overhaul

Commissioner Sarah Swanson, commissioner of the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, gave the Section A Subcommittee an overview of the agency’s Employment Standards Division and the department’s recent technology upgrades.

Swanson said the division oversees building codes, weights and measures, contractor registration, multiple licensing boards, the Human Rights Bureau, mediation and arbitration services and worker safety programs. “Our theme is capacity, capacity, capacity in the professional occupational licensing bureau,” she told the committee.

The nut graf: the department described program scope, staff levels and several decision packages the governor’s executive budget will seek, and emphasized that recent multi-system technology modernizations have increased processing capacity even as licensing workloads have risen.

Swanson told lawmakers the building codes program has 41 positions budgeted and issued over 43,000 building permits statewide last year; 18 cities or counties operate as certified local jurisdictions that administer code permitting locally but must…