Mission Statement
Working for you
My friends I feel there are many issues facing our State today that need to be addressed in the next Legislative session; among these the need for jobs, the Montana State Budget and Taxes.
The most important thing impacting Montana and HD 4 right now is the lack of jobs. We need to remember that the private sector is the only way out of this mess. Montana needs to develop incentives to bring investment to the state by starting to utilize the natural resources we possess. We need to redesign the way Helena deals with business to make it more attractive to new industry and growth and we must reduce the State governments spending to reduce the burden on the private sector. The obvious added benefit of more jobs is more employers helping the residents with the burden of taxes.
Montana will be facing a major deficit by the next session of the Legislature. We must not raise taxes in this recession; therefore the only remaining option is to reduce government spending. We need to run our State like a Business and increase accountability to the taxpayers. We have to find ways to encourage efficiency and develop ways to introduce competition into all the departments in Helena. State employees need incentives to find innovative ways to reduce spending in their offices and we need to work toward goal driven budgets that are no longer base line spending established. The cost of government needs to be constantly justified to the tax payer and reductions must be found. This session will call for some tough decisions to be made in Helena and we need people who sign their employees pay checks on the front to do it.
Lastly and most importantly we must deal with the Tax structure in Montana. We must not raise taxes and in fact they need to be reduced dramatically. I addressed ways to deal with this, yet more must be done. We must find a way constitutionally to make property tax appraisal based and set state wide standards that can be depended upon year after year. We must allow the natural resources of this, the Treasure State to be exploited in ways that maintain our natural beauty and tourism. The addition of industry based on our energy reserves will allow for less tax burden on the average Montana family, as demonstrated by neighboring States like Wyoming. We have to look for new ideas in funding the State because we have all seen that the old way of doing things are not working and neither are we.
