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 follow the state code. Weights and Measures is a separate team of 11 positions that certifies scales and measuring devices statewide. Swanson credited a one-time transfer made in the prior session for allowing equipment and vehicle upgrades in weights and measures that reduced travel costs.

On licensing, Swanson said the department administers 29 governor-appointed professional licensing boards and 14 licensing programs that lack a board. She said boards rely on nearly 300 volunteer members. The department described a marked increase in licensees over the last decade and tighter staff capacity in the licensing bureau. Swanson said licensing remains labor-intensive despite a full cloud migration to a platform the agency calls Acela and other modern systems (Muse for unemployment, Employ Montana for workforce services). She said the department completed three major technology modernizations in under two years using an enterprise project management approach.

Swanson described consolidation packages forthcoming to combine several small boards into larger boards. She said one package would consolidate three medical facility-related licenses (clinical laboratory scientists, respiratory therapists and radiology technicians) into a facility health board; another would combine occupational therapists, physical therapists, athletic trainers, speech-language pathologists and audiologists into a single board for rehabilitative and developmental health-care professionals. She said stakeholders supported both consolidations.

On enforcement, Swanson detailed contractor registration requirements (registration is required but the department currently lacks authority to suspend or revoke contractor registrations; the department said legislation is pending that would allow discipline for conduct that financially or illegally harms Montanans). She described the Human Rights Bureau, governed by the Montana Human Rights Commission and enforcing the Montana Human Rights Act, as handling roughly 650 cases per year.

Budget and decision-package highlights presented to the committee included: a request to switch the Human Rights Bureau from general fund to state special revenue (contingent on pending legislation), increased appropriation authority for federal grants, requests for maintenance-contract funding for the new IT platforms, a present-law request for postage/mailing inflation, and a request for equipment replacement funding for weights and measures. The department emphasized it paid for the technology upgrades within existing appropriation authority and that ongoing maintenance contract funding is critical to keep systems current.

Committee members asked for more detail on the specific board consolidations and pressed the department on how the technology projects were completed without House Bill 10 requests. LFD staff described proposed funding moves and showed the ESD’s request for state special revenue and federal grant authority in the 2027 biennium budget materials.

Ending: The department told lawmakers it will follow up with written materials on board-consolidation lists and on building-code fund transfers; staff said some decision packages are contingent on draft legislative concepts and will be updated as bills are introduced.