The MT Lowdown is a weekly digest that showcases a more personal side of Montana Free Press’ high-quality reporting while keeping you up to speed on the biggest news impacting Montanans. Want to see the MT Lowdown in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

Take a drive through scenic river valleys like the Bitterroot, Flathead, Gallatin or Yellowstone, and you’ll find a proliferation of 10-acre ranchettes, often within eyeshot of a municipal boundary.

The vast majority of those homes are served by wells and septic systems that have no monitoring requirements and almost no state oversight. Welcome to the world of exempt wells, called so because the people who put them in aren’t required to demonstrate that existing water users won’t be negatively affected by new straws going into the aquifers below, which are often hydrologically connected to the state’s rivers and lakes.

Exempt wells have become the water-procurement tool of choice for residential developers in rural and semi-rural areas because using the exempt-well loophole is easier, faster and cheaper than the alternative: buying someone else’s water right or applying for a new one, if one is even available. Some 141,000 such wells exist in Montana, withdrawing an untold amount of water from underground aquifers. 

A lawsuit filed this week by a coalition of water stakeholders seeks to change that development and water-use pattern. The Montana League of Cities and Towns and its eight co-plaintiffs have argued that the law allowing exempt wells has been abused and that the water rights of senior holders and “the integrity of Montana’s water resources” are at stake. They’re asking a district court judge in Helena to strike down the law to uphold the constitutional protections afforded to senior water users.

If that happens, there will be significant implications for the housing industry in Montana, which is facing skyrocketing home prices and an increase in home construction outside the reach of public water supplies.

Kelly Lynch, Montana League of Cities and Towns’ executive director, said her organization didn’t come to the decision to file the lawsuit lightly. Had the Legislature mustered the political will to revise the exempt-well statute, the legal challenge wouldn’t have been necessary, she told Montana Free Press recently. She said the plaintiffs believe they couldn’t wait any longer for the Legislature to break its decades-long stalemate on the issue.

Her comment brought to mind a bit of insight from Sen. Wylie Galt, who earlier this year pushed passionately but unsuccessfully for a compromise package that Lynch and some of her co-plaintiffs developed to tackle the issue of exempt wells. 

“We are hurting people with the Wild West of punching holes in the ground,” said Galt, a Republican from Martinsdale who is both a rancher and a property developer. “Water is an issue. The state is growing. We need to deal with this. Status quo will not work.”

How all this shakes out remains to be seen. However, if previous court rulings, including the 2023 Horse Creek Hills ruling that Galt alluded to during his testimony on Senate Bill 358 earlier this year, provide a workable guide, it will create an uphill battle for those who wish to preserve the exempt well loophole.

 — Amanda Eggert

Hot Potato 🥔

The Gianforte administration’s monthslong effort to find an eastern Montana location for a new mental health facility drew official interest from just two towns: Hardin and Miles City.

The state’s deadline for cities to register interest was Nov. 10. According to a draft timeline from the Board of Investments, the state development authority spearheading the process, site tours are scheduled for next week, and BOI is aiming to submit a final location proposal to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s office before Thanksgiving.

But it’s unclear if either of the two locations in southeastern Montana is ideal for the state to build, staff and operate the 32-bed facility meant to rehabilitate mentally ill patients involved with the criminal justice system.

The state’s process for choosing a location abruptly rerouted in September to offer interested cities and towns a chance to file site proposals. That change came after BOI officials’ initial site explorations in Billings, the state’s largest city and workforce pool, garnered significant blowback. Some local officials, including Yellowstone County commissioners, griped that the state had appeared to decide — rather than request — that Billings would host the new facility.

 Billings is now notably absent from the very short list of towns that raised their hands for consideration. In a Nov. 5 letter to the Board of Investments and the head of the state health department, outgoing Billings Mayor Bill Cole emphasized the city’s support for adding services that could also help local residents. But he also argued that the ball is in the state’s court.

“[A]lthough we recognize the need for a forensic facility in eastern Montana as a general

matter, Billings is not prepared at this time to submit a formal ‘proposal’ asking that such a facility be located here. This is a state project, not a city project. If the city were to submit an application and actively advocate for it, that would suggest a level of understanding, confidence, and commitment that simply does not exist at the present time,” the letter said.

Another community that did not submit a proposal for the state’s project is Laurel, a town of roughly 7,200 about 18 miles west of Billings. In a late-October City Council meeting, officials in Laurel indicated that they had been approached by officials from the Board of Investments months ago about a possible site location. But responding to the state’s request for proposals did not make sense for Laurel, city staff said, seeing as the town does not have a parcel of land within its limits that meets the state’s needs.

“From my understanding, they wanted an invitation from the community. And as a municipality, from the city of Laurel, we had no land that would have been able to meet it,” said Kurt Markegard, the city’s planning director, in an interview with MTFP. 

Markegard added that the city has an annexation policy for parcels of land that border the city, allowing their owners to be linked to city water and sewer services if they so desire. 

“They approach the City Council. It doesn’t go the other way,” Markegard said, adding that the timeline to change any city ordinances or rules is much longer than the weekslong span that towns had for submitting site proposals to the governor’s administration.

In the October meeting with City Council members, Markegard hinted at some efforts to unify eastern Montana cities against the state’s approach.

“I have a message from Bill Cole, and I’d like to read that into the record,” Markegard said. “‘It’s very simple. This means our best option is for all the potential eastern Montana communities — Billings, Laurel, Columbus, Hardin — to say none of them are going to submit an application on this timeline.’ So that is from the mayor of Billings, Bill Cole.”

Cole did not respond to questions about that message from MTFP. 

Markegard also declined to elaborate on Cole’s message when asked about it by MTFP, saying he only wanted to ensure that City Council members were apprised of all the information he had. But Markegard said that, generally, Laurel and Billings have had similar experiences with the state’s outreach so far.

“We haven’t been asked to participate. I think that’s the issue,” Markegard said. Cole, he added, “wanted the same thing, which was a conversation.”

A spokesperson for Gianforte’s office did not respond to a question Thursday about whether the state’s search for potential sites would be limited to those that filed official proposals. 

— Mara Silvers

The Gist 📌

Bundled in coats, about two dozen people waited outside the Ō’yō’·ṗ’ Food Pantry on the Blackfeet Reservation on a cold and windy afternoon in November. 

At 1 p.m., the doors opened and people flooded inside. Some grabbed grocery carts and made their way through the aisles; others sat in folding chairs, waiting for their turn. 

Volunteer Lucian Prairie Chicken said the pantry no longer sees “little waves” of people.

“It’s a tsunami,” he said. 

Operated by FAST Blackfeet, the Ō’yō’·ṗ’ pantry, like food pantries nationwide, has seen an increase in demand due to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) disruption caused by the federal government shutdown. FAST stands for Food Access and Sustainability Team.

Although the longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended on Nov. 12, families around the country, including those in Montana, missed their regular SNAP payments scheduled for Nov. 1, leaving them unable to afford groceries. While some people received partial payments earlier this week, the White House says people should see their full benefits restored quickly after the government reopening.

Pantry manager Cindy Salway said Ō’yō’·ṗ’ typically serves about 380 families and distributes about 7,000 pounds of food each week. But during the week of Oct. 27 — just as SNAP disruptions went into effect — the pantry saw 101 new families on top of its regular users and distributed more than 18,000 pounds of food. She said the pantry went through 10 pallets of food in one distribution — an amount that would normally take about three weeks and six distributions to work through. 

“It’s just everybody being so insecure and not knowing what’s going to happen,” she told MTFP on Nov. 6.

FAST Blackfeet codirectors Danielle Antelope and Iris Shap said food insecurity looks different in Indian Country, and its causes and consequences are unique to tribes’ relationship with the federal government. 

“It really is a luxury and a privilege to go to the store and buy whatever the heck you want and not look at the price and check out and make a really nice, healthy dinner,” Antelope said. “That is all privilege. And it’s a privilege that we haven’t had for generations and generations in Blackfeet Country.”

Many treaties between tribes and the federal government require the government to provide tribes with food and access to their traditional lands. To uphold those agreements, the government has distributed food, originally referred to as rations, to tribal communities since the 1800s. Around that same time, U.S. soldiers killed millions of buffalo to devastate the tribes that relied on them for food, clothing, shelter and ceremony. As a result, tribes suffered starvation and became increasingly dependent on government rations, which often consisted of nontraditional foods like flour and lard. 

In 1891, Congress enacted a law requiring Native children to attend boarding schools, where, as a form of assimilation, they were punished for speaking their languages and practicing their culture. The government later withheld food from families who refused to send their kids to these schools, and food denial was also used as a punishment tactic at the schools. 

“That was the means of control from the government,” Sharp said. “Controlling the food source meant that they could control us.”

The latest SNAP disruptions, Sharp added, are an example of “history repeating, but on a larger scale.”

“They can repeat history because people don’t know about it,” she said. 

— Nora Mabie

Glad You Asked 🙋🏻

For months, I’ve been fielding questions from readers curious about whether a city can legally sell large quantities of water to businesses or individuals miles and miles away.  

The questions were spurred by reports that Crazy Mountain Ranch, the luxury guest ranch in Clyde Park, tapped Big Timber, Boulder and Four Corners near Bozeman for tens of millions of gallons of water to keep the greens on its golf course alive. The ranch started the practice in July as it waited for the state to decide if it could change how and where it uses its own water rights, which are considerable and have historically been used for agricultural purposes. Residents of the municipalities selling water are wary of the practice because the water is being transported to an entirely different basin, the Shields Valley.

There are hydrological and legal considerations at the heart of that question. Other water stakeholders care where water is used because water that stays in a specific basin can continue to replenish local water resources, whether the mechanism driving that replenishment is wastewater treatment or a “recharge” process whereby water that irrigates lawns or crops seeps back into the aquifers below. Lawyers care about where water is being used because Montana law specifies that water rights must have a specific place of use.

Earlier this week, I asked the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the state agency responsible for administering water rights, for its take. 

“Cities with municipal water rights often have fill stations for water purchase, which is allowed under the Water Use Act. These water rights allow for fill stations that are within the place of use identified on the water right. Once water is purchased at a fill station, the water can be used anywhere within the state and for any purpose by the purchaser,” DNRC spokesperson Moira Davin wrote to MTFP.

University of Montana law professor Michelle Bryan wrote in a text message to MTFP that there’s a little more to it, though. 

She wrote that opponents of the state’s interpretation — which was codified in an opinion letter the DNRC issued when the eastern Montana town of Glendive started selling water to companies that were trucking it into the Bakken oil fields to facilitate fracking operations — argue it isn’t “keeping with the spirit of having a designated place of use within a service area.”

“Opponents also argue that to sell water, the use classification of the water right should be commercial (like a bottling plant who sells water to store) rather than municipal,” she continued. “And that perhaps the city in question doesn’t need that much water for future growth and is thus exceeding its own beneficial use needs.”

Bryan added that the agency’s interpretation is, to her knowledge, “untested in the courts.”

Andrew Gorder, who worked for the Montana Water Court as a water master and now serves as the Clark Fork Coalition’s legal and policy director, said he “doesn’t disagree” with the DNRC’s interpretation on fill stations, but pointed out that a “municipal fill station is different from a municipal well or reservoir.” In a recent email to MTFP, he added that he’s not aware of any “special allowances for municipalities that would allow them to sell water for use outside their place of use.”

“If a city or town wants to change where its water can be used or change the use to allow for commercial sale of water, it’s my opinion that this change would need approval from the DNRC,” he wrote.

— Amanda Eggert

News of the News 📰

The news isn’t all bad for public media, at least in Montana. 

Though the state’s public media entities lost an estimated $2.6 million in annual funding in July when Republican President Donald Trump signed a bill known as a rescission that effectively closed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, no Montana stations have left the airwaves or cut staff. And in August, three of Montana’s public media outlets reported successful fundraising campaigns. Here’s where each of the state’s five outlets stands now.

  • Montana PBS
    • CPB shortfall: MTPBS’s $1.8 million hole, about 20% of its total budget, represented the largest funding gap in Montana public media. 
    • Fundraising: The station’s “Bridge the Gap” campaign leveraged a $900,000 match sponsored by a group of longtime donors in the wake of the loss of federal money. At a fundraising concert in late October, MTPBS raised the last of its share of the $900,000.
    • Outlook: Director and General Manager Aaron Pruitt called the financial support “wonderful” and “truly amazing.” He also highlighted that — because reduction impacted two years of funding — MTPBS is less than a year away from a second $1.8 million shortfall. In a Nov. 3 interview with MTFP, he said the upcoming winter pledge drive will focus on “asking viewers that are watching to think about becoming members maybe for the first time or increasing their sustainer giving.”
  • Montana Public Radio
    • CPB shortfall: Western Montana’s MTPR faced a $350,000 shortfall in the wake of the rescission bill, about 11% of its annual operating budget. 
    • Fundraising: During a summer pledge drive presented as a response to actions in D.C., the Missoula-based station raised almost $500,000. In its mid-October fundraising drive, a campaign aimed at covering standard operating expenses, the station exceeded its $350,000 goal. 
    • Outlook: Anne Hosler, MTPR’s Broadcast Media Center director, said the station is drafting strategies to fill the shortfall that will strike again next year, but that she “can’t comment on those plans as we are still developing them.”
  • Yellowstone Public Radio 
    • CPB shortfall: Eastern Montana’s YPR, based in Billings, faced a $300,000 hole, roughly 20% of its total operating budget. 
    • Fundraising: Immediately after the rescission, the station conducted a two-day emergency fundraising effort that raised more than $100,000. YPR increased its fall fundraising goal from $200,000 to $250,000. The campaign ultimately netted $300,000. 
    • Outlook: YPR General Manager Ken Siebert said station supporters should understand this is “an ongoing challenge.” He also highlighted that it will be difficult to measure whether the station was “successful in fully raising all of the money that would have been lost by federal funding” until the end of their fiscal year, in the summer of 2026.
  • KGVA
    • CPB shortfall: The Fort Belknap-based radio station received about $120,000 in its last payment from CPB. The figure represents about 80% of its funding. 
    • Fundraising: The station has yet to confirm concrete plans to fill its funding gap.
    • Outlook: Acting station manager Jack Jones, the entity’s sole full-time employee, anticipates KGVA can last for about a year without money from CPB. 
  • KGLT 
    • CPB shortfall: The Bozeman-based radio station, which shares infrastructure with Montana PBS but operates as a mostly separate entity, faces a $130,000 rescission, about 30% of its budget. 
    • Fundraising: The station is launching its first-ever fall pledge drive, breaking from its usual practice of only one campaign each year. The organization is also applying for a grant from Public Media Co., a fund supported by philanthropic groups — including the MacArthur and Ford Foundations — that aims to restore funding to stations that lost significant federal funding in the rescission. PMC plans to direct roughly $27 million to public media entities nationwide through its dedicated Public Media Bridge Fund. 
    • Outlook: MTPBS’s Aaron Pruitt, who technically oversees the head of KGLT and spoke to MTFP on the station’s behalf, said the shortfall “definitely presents a challenge,” but also said that KGLT is “not at risk of going off the air any time soon.”

— Zeke Lloyd

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

  • The private national company operating a highly scrutinized addiction monitoring program for nurses, doctors and other medical providers will exit its contract with Montana’s labor department at the end of January 2026.
  • Have a backyard Airbnb? Proposed rules say Montana’s upcoming second-home tax will hit it.

On Our Radar

Nora — It’s fall, y’all! I made pumpkin cardamom muffins this week, and this recipe is a winner!

Holly — Growing up, I loved visiting the elephants at the Oregon Zoo (RIP Packy). And now, through the magic of the internet, I can listen to my kid squeal in delight watching this year’s Squishing Of The Squash, featuring the adorable Tula-Tu.

Zeke — It was a big week for elephants at zoos across the country. My hometown of Columbus, Ohio, welcomed a newborn elephant on Oct. 21. The calf’s half sister, Rita Jean, was born in July. This year marks the first in zoo history that two calves were born in the same year. 

Eric — A new Montana law this year means every city and town in the state is now required to publish audio or video recordings of its meetings. This lovely piece from the Terry Tribune illustrates what that looks like in practice in a 562-person town in Eastern Montana.

Amanda — I was delighted to stumble across “A Surf Legend’s Long Ride,” a piece New Yorker writer William Finnegan wrote about a 75-year-old roofer from Hawaii who still makes regular forays into his local surf break. I’d wager that profiles are some of the hardest feature stories to write, but they can be oh-so-enjoyable to read, as Finnegan reminds us.

*Some stories may require a subscription. Subscribe!

REPORT AN ERROR

BEST PRACTICES

ABOUT MTFP