Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Transportation topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Montana bill would let counties refer urban transportation districts to voters, ease municipal bus limits
Summary
House Bill 764 would let county commissioners refer creation or boundary changes of Urban Transportation Districts to voters by resolution rather than by an often costly petition drive, and would remove a 1975 limit barring municipal buses from operating more than eight miles beyond city borders so long as funding is found. Supporters say it reduces administrative barriers; questions remain about statutory definitions and taxpayer remedies.
Representative Brian Close introduced House Bill 764 as a technical cleanup to two 1975 provisions in Montana’s transportation code, saying the change would allow counties to begin formation or boundary adjustments for Urban Transportation Districts (UTDs) by county resolution rather than forcing petition drives that he called “massive” and expensive. “The purpose of this bill is to clean up 2 provisions for the transportation code that were created in 1975,” Close said at the hearing.
Supporters from Montana’s transit systems told the Senate Local Government Committee the petition route can be onerous. Jordan Hess, chief executive of Mountain Line (Missoula’s UTD), said the statute’s petition threshold and boundary rules sometimes produce inconsistent service and high administrative cost. “We give about 1,250,000 rides per year,” Hess said, arguing that allowing county referral “still allows the voters the opportunity to approve or take a pass on the formation or expansion of a district” while reducing the burden of signature-gathering.
Sunshine Ross, transit director for Streamline and the Gallatin Valley UTD, described Bozeman’s multi-year effort to form a UTD, saying staff and volunteers spent months collecting signatures and that the office had to verify more than 16,000 certified signatures to meet a roughly 20% threshold. Ross said the bill would eliminate the multi‑month signature collection step though “all of the other work that we did to educate the public and to educate our partners and stakeholders, would still have to happen.” Rusty Logan of Billings Metro Transit and the Montana Transit Association told senators the bill would help growing communities explore regional service and interlocal agreements which the current eight‑mile municipal limit can obstruct.
The bill also removes an antiquated restriction in the municipal bus code that limited municipal systems from running more than eight miles outside city limits. Representative Close said the provision, written when private bus firms were common, now functions as an anti‑competitive barrier and that its removal would allow cities such as Billings and Butte more flexibility “provided they find a way to pay for it.”
Committee members pressed proponents on several limits and safeguards. Senator Hertz asked how the bill preserves service guarantees and what legal paths taxpayers have to leave a district if they are not being served; witnesses acknowledged the statute is “clunky,” noted that “direct service” is not well defined in existing law, and welcomed further statutory cleanup. Senator Hurds urged adding clearer de‑accession language to protect taxpayers who are assessed but not served.
Representative Close closed by stressing the bill does not eliminate the citizen petition option: “This just this eliminates the petition stamp, but not the petition process,” he said, adding that counties would still hold public hearings and put any proposal to a public vote. The committee closed the hearing; no vote was recorded during the session.
