Legislative Fiscal Division demos interactive budget and property-tax tools, highlighting agricultural land data

Nick Van Brown, a Legislative Fiscal Division (LFD) staffer, and LFD analysts demonstrated interactive budget and property-tax data tools to the Montana Senate Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation during a committee meeting (date not specified).

The tools, available from the LFD publications and libraries pages and linked from the legislative website, combine the governor's budget entry system with Department of Revenue property-tax data to produce live dashboards that update through the session, staff said. "This information is exactly the same as that you would get from the subcommittees, and it will update as we move through session," Nick Van Brown said.

The presentation walked committee members through several dashboards focused on property taxes: statewide taxes paid by taxing unit, taxes paid by property class (residential, commercial, agricultural/forest), a map organized by levy district showing an "effective tax rate" (taxes paid as a percentage of assessed value), and parcel-size histograms. Kurt Swimley, an LFD analyst who led the property-tax demonstration, explained taxable value and appraisal basics: "The Department of Revenue every two years issues an appraised value, and then statute certifies a tax rate for different classes, which together produce the taxable value used to generate tax bills." He showed filters for county, taxing unit and property class and said users can drill into examples such as Fallon County to see how a few large pipeline or electric properties can change county totals year to year.

Joe Bon, another LFD analyst, described a separate set of agriculture data drawn from the U.S. Department of Agriculture census and state records to show trends in acres operated, farm-size bins and livestock counts. "The average acres operated in 2022 was about 2,300 acres," Bon said while describing regional and county-level patterns and the census's five-year cadence.

Presenters pointed out notable features users can explore: the effect of the 2023 reappraisal cycle on tax-shifting between classes, the relative uniformity of agricultural appraisals driven by a production-capacity formula and capitalization rates, and special-assessment and TIF schedules that do not follow standard mill calculations. Staff said the most recent fiscal-year data available in the tools was FY2024 and that some modeling pages allow parameter changes (for example the 1.35 residential rate and state equalization mills) to simulate outcomes if statutory parameters are altered.

Committee members asked about causes for apparent declines in recorded agricultural acreage and farm counts; staff said observing those trends is a purpose of the tools but that causal explanations require follow-up analysis. "We'd have to dig in to explain a fiscal-year drop in a specific county; the tools let us find those oddities so we can investigate them further," Kurt Swimley said.

LFD staff described supplemental resources on the LFD site: a property-tax library with county maps of taxable value per acre, acreage-by-class time series, parcel-size distributions and guidance on levy districts. Staff offered to run follow-up queries and prepare aggregated reports for the committee or individual senators.

The session contained no formal committee votes on the tools; staff closed by inviting further questions and offering to prepare tailored analyses on request.