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Legislative Fiscal Division showcases agricultural data and property-tax dashboards for lawmakers
Summary
Legislative Fiscal Division staff demonstrated interactive data tools for legislators, including agricultural property-tax dashboards, parcel-size distributions, effective tax-rate visualizations and USDA census maps to support policy and budget analysis.
Legislators received a demonstration of interactive data tools from the Legislative Fiscal Division aimed at improving access to state and local datasets relevant to agriculture and budgeting.
Nick Van Brown, assistant director with the Legislative Fiscal Division, described the tools as business-intelligence dashboards that link state, local and school data with live connections so legislators can visualize trends and ask iterative questions. He highlighted examples such as budget and revenue visualizations and said the division works to tailor tools to committee needs.
Kurt Swimley, a fiscal analyst who focuses on property taxes, demonstrated agricultural property-tax dashboards that allow users to view taxes paid by class, assessed market value versus taxable value, and effective tax rates by levy district. Swimley explained that agricultural land in Montana is typically valued on a productivity basis using soil surveys and classification (grazing, irrigated, nonirrigated), and that certain parcel-size rules affect qualification for agricultural class (for example, parcels over 160 acres are automatically classified as qualified agricultural in the tool's presentation).
Joe Bond presented 1997–2022 USDA Agricultural Census data broken out by region, showing regional differences in median farm size and county maps of the share of acreage reported as agricultural. Bond also noted the fiscal division can use Department of Revenue per-animal fees to estimate livestock counts by county.
Committee members asked whether the tools allow drilling into municipal or water-district budgets and how farmsteads are valued; staff said local financials are accessible in the dashboards and that valuation of improvements may vary by class and requires case-specific review. Analysts invited legislators to request follow-up analyses and to use the tools for bill and budget questions.
The division said these resources are available on the Legislative Fiscal Division website and that staff will assist committees and legislators in using the dashboards.
