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Legislative Fiscal Division demos interactive property‑tax and agriculture data tools to Senate committee
Summary
LFD staff showed senators interactive, public-facing dashboards that pull Department of Revenue and governor's budget data, demonstrating filters by county and property class and modeling scenarios for tax and budget analysis; staff offered follow-up analysis on ag acreage and consolidation trends.
The Senate Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation Committee received a demonstration of new Legislative Fiscal Division (LFD) interactive data tools that allow lawmakers and the public to explore property‑tax and agricultural data, LFD staff said.
The tools, shown by LFD staffers Nick Van Brown and Kurt Swimley, combine governor’s budget entries, Department of Revenue valuations and other public data into web dashboards that senators can filter by county, tax class and year. Van Brown said the dashboards will refresh during session and are intended to make budget and tax information “another way of just looking at it that’s not a sheet of paper.”
Committee members said the tools could help oversight and drafting by making county-level patterns and shifts easier to spot. Swimley demonstrated pages that show taxes paid by taxing unit, effective tax rates (taxes paid divided by assessed value), newly taxable property, and tax changes inside TIF districts. He said agricultural and forest property appraisals are more uniform across counties because they are derived from production formulas and capitalization rates, which produces relatively uniform effective tax rates for those classes.
Swimley and Joe Bon, another LFD analyst, illustrated agricultural-specific views: taxable value per acre maps, acreage counts by class, and USDA‑Census-derived charts showing counts of operations by size. Bon noted the USDA census data run through 2022 and that median acres operated in 2022 were about 2,300. Swimley pointed to a small net decline in recorded agricultural acreage—from “close to 54,000,000 to a little under 53,900,000” in the LFD visualization—and cautioned that a 2020 bump looked like a likely data artifact that would need follow-up.
On technical features, the presenters said the embedded images in the slide deck are static and that users must click the live link on the public site (legmt.gov) to access interactive dashboards. They also showed modeling tools that can run scenarios based on parameters in state law, and flagged data‑privacy limits for some county‑level sales or revenue details.
Senators asked whether trends reflect urban sprawl, reclassification or consolidation. LFD staff said they had not completed causal analyses but offered to follow up with targeted requests from the committee. Van Brown and Bon urged members to send specific questions so staff could drill into county- or region-level drivers.
The presentation concluded with senators asking LFD to consider producing a 10–20 year agriculture‑trends report, and staff agreeing to follow up. No formal committee action was taken at the meeting.
