Legislative fiscal analysts demonstrated MARA — a modular data and business‑intelligence platform — and a suite of public interactive dashboards that model population, school enrollment, property‑tax changes and other long‑range fiscal topics for lawmakers.

Amy Carlson, a legislative fiscal analyst filling in for staff, described MARA as a modular system of linked data tables and tools developed since about 2017 that allows staff to answer complex fiscal questions more quickly. Carlson said the project’s stated legislative purpose is to "study the long term future budget and revenue needs of the state with changing economics and demographics," and the office has expanded the platform to serve multiple topic modules and user needs.

Julia Patton navigated committee members to the legislative fiscal website and the interactive tools and school‑funding library. She showed the school enrollment, expenditures and revenue dashboards, which allow filtering by county or district and show multi‑year trends for revenues, expenditures and enrollment categories. Patton also demonstrated the property‑tax suite, which includes 10 dashboards: views by taxing unit and tax class, maps of effective rates, new versus existing property tax growth, special district information, per‑capita tax comparisons and scenario modeling.

The property‑tax scenario tool lets users slide parameters — for example, a change in the district‑general‑fund GTB ratio or residential reappraisal assumptions — and then runs calculations (the staff noted these can be time‑intensive) to show modeled statewide and county impacts on local and state tax amounts. Patton used a small change in the GTB ratio as an example and showed the tool’s modeled local tax difference statewide and a county‑level impact for Gallatin County.

Staff emphasized the tools are public on the legislative website and that their aim is to make complex data accessible to legislators, local officials and the public. Carlson and Patton said the MARA modules are extensible and that legislative offices may ask staff to run additional scenarios or export custom datasets when committees need specialized analysis.

The committee thanked staff for the demonstrations and noted that the tools — particularly the property tax model and the school funding dashboards — will inform upcoming budget decisions, including HB2 deliberations and any statutory changes under consideration.