Beatty’s Countywide Base Levy Bill Spurs Lengthy Committee Discussion on Equity, Complexity and Implementation

Representative David Beatty introduced House Bill 156, which would replace district‑level base mill levies (the nonvoted base levies that fund the general fund minimum) with a countywide base levy. He said the new countywide approach would aggregate taxable value and enrollment at the county level and produce a single mill rate that would be levied across school taxing jurisdictions in the county, modeled after the existing countywide retirement levy process.

‘‘The result will be a single mill rate that will be levied on each school taxing jurisdiction within the county,’’ Beatty said. He told the committee the bill aims to narrow wide disparities in base mill levies across the state and to make guaranteed tax base aid (GTB) go further toward equalization.

Lance Melton (MSBA) supported the bill and said it implements a recommendation of the Property Tax Task Force. Melton summarized fiscal modeling provided to the committee: the bill would modestly reduce the base mill rate in most taxing jurisdictions with an average general‑fund mill reduction of about three mills and an average reduction across other levies of about seven mills. He said 235 of 302 school taxing jurisdictions were modeled to see reductions.

Committee members pressed for details about outlier counties and implementation burdens. Sponsor and staff identified several counties as outliers in the modeling (Carter, Madison, Musselshell, Rosebud and Wheatland) because they have special revenue sources or very low populations. Paul Taylor (OPI) and other witnesses explained that the proposal creates administrative work for county treasurers and superintendents because counties would aggregate district base areas and work with OPI to certify county totals (a process similar to existing county retirement levies). Taylor said estimated state costs were zero but that counties would face additional administrative burden and that the agency would absorb programming costs.

Senators described the school funding formula as complicated and asked whether the bill anticipates the upcoming decennial study of school funding. Beatty said the change does not substantially alter the funding formula itself but changes how property tax obligations are aggregated and distributed, and that the effective date was set to FY2027 to allow time for implementation.

Proponents argued the change would better equalize tax burdens and permit the state’s GTB appropriation to have a greater equalizing effect; opponents were not recorded in the supplied transcript. The committee closed the hearing; no committee vote appears in the excerpt provided.