Myth Busters Volume 2: Government Spending, Taxing and the Budget

“County government is funded mostly by taxpayer money.” “If Missoula County didn’t spend any more money next year, taxes would stop going up.” Have you heard this before? Are these statements true or false? 

This week the commissioners spoke with Chris Lounsbury, chief administrative officer for Missoula County, about budgeting, taxing and government spending. Tune in to this week’s episode for some myth-busting with a side of tax policy.

Related links:

• FY 2024 Budget Page
• Commissioner's Public Meeting Portal
• See budgets from previous years

 
Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

 

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:10] Well, welcome back, everyone, to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners. I'm Dave Strohmaier. I am joined today by my good friends and colleagues, Juanita Vero and Josh Slotnick. And today we are also joined by Chris Lounsbury, our chief administrative officer for Missoula County, keeper of encyclopedic knowledge of Missoula County and all things Missoula County. Welcome back to the show, Chris.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:00:34] Oh, thank you guys for having me. I always love to come on.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:37] Great to have you here, Chris.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:38] And we're going to do a little bit of myth-busting today. Among other things, as we talk about the county's budget. We are in the thick of budget season as we speak.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:49] Can I throw a myth towards Chris straight away?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:51] Let her rip. Yes.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:52] Yeah. So I had a conversation with a local group on Friday, and one gentleman was quite angry that we were using tax money in the purchase of Marshall Mountain when there were roads that needed to be repaired. And I tried to explain the lack of fluidity in money within the budget. There's a myth here that all the money is together and we just use it as we need to. And the comparison is often made to families and kitchen table economics like this is how we do it. Why don't you do it that way? Can you help shed some light on this myth around how we call it silos or buckets of money?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:01:25] Yeah, you bet. So silos or buckets is a great way of thinking about it. For example, with Marshall Mountain, the voters passed an open space bond in 2019, was the most recent one, and that money can only be used for the purposes for which they passed it. So, for example, the money that's going to be used to purchase Marshall Mountain can't go to fix roads. It's similar to if you're a county resident. You pay some mills to the county, for example, for county roads. And that money that comes in for county roads can only be used to fix county roads, can't go to animal control or to be used on houselessness initiatives or any of those things. And then we have revenue that we collect from all residents of Missoula County called general fund mills or countywide mills, and those are a little more in the control of the commission and can be used for a variety of purposes. But really when the county is collecting money, most of the money that we collect is for a specific purpose and it has to be used for that specific purpose that it's collected. It can't just be moved around.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:16] And that's by statute.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:02:17] That is by statute. Yep. State law is very specific in how we spend money and how we collect taxes.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:02:23] And even though folks are getting tax bills from Missoula County writing checks to Missoula County, besides Missoula County operations, there are other taxing jurisdictions that we divvy that up, too.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:02:35] That's right. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, no one who writes a check to Missoula County is is actually paying all of that money to Missoula County as an entity, because no matter where you live in our county, you are part of a school district. You are most likely part of a fire district and you are most likely part of either another governmental entity like the city of Missoula. Or if you might be in like Florence, you might be part of a cemetery district. Or if you're in Seeley Lake, you're part of a hospital district. And those funds that get taxed, all that check comes to Missoula County. And then Missoula County is the one who divides that out among all of those different taxing jurisdictions. So there's no place in Missoula County, even though you only get one bill and you only have to write one check where that money is all actually coming to stay at Missoula County and is under the control of the county is the way that it's spent.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:16] This, too, is by statute, right?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:03:18] That's correct. Yep. Counties are actually an arm of the state. And so our job is to carry out the functions that the state has set out for us. And one of those things is to be the Treasurer, right? One of those jobs is to send out tax notices and collect those taxes and then divide those monies among the taxing jurisdictions, and that includes the money that we collect for the state. Yeah, and.

Juanita Vero: [00:03:35] That division isn't we don't have any control over that division.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:03:38] That's right. Yeah, it is. It is set out by the Montana code annotated and in many cases for folks to know, just like we always encourage them to get involved in local government through their election process. For a lot of those other things, they have their own elections. Right? So many of our special districts have elections where you'll see if you live in Lolo, for example, members of the fire board on there or you might see it for your local school board or you might even see it for your local cemetery district where you have the opportunity to elect folks to participate on that board and then they control that portion of the budget.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:06] I want to get to a foundational myth nugget here. "County government gets a lot of tax revenue but is bad at determining where to spend it. If we were just better at budgeting, taxes go down."

Chris Lounsbury: [00:04:17] That is a great myth that's out there and it's one that's really hard I think, for folks to really wrap their head around. But it really isn't true. You know, we have just a host of things. As I mentioned, we're part of the state, right? We're a division of state government that we are statutorily required to do. As a matter of fact, the amount of budget that's actually discretionary is minuscule. We are required, for example, to provide law enforcement services. So we have a sheriff's department. We're required to provide a detention center and we're required to staff that detention center. We're required to provide resources for district court justice, court planning. There's really very little of the county does that's actually discretionary when it comes to that. And even if we were to hold as many costs as we could to the exact same number that was available to us last year, the fact is, just like you see inflationary pressures when you're sitting at your kitchen table or if you had to go buy tires at Costco or at Les Schwab, if you went to the gas pump recently and gas has gone up recently and had to have. The oil changed in your car? We pay all of those same costs. We have vehicles that we have to do when we go out to pave roads. The cost for asphalt, which is petroleum derivative product, that's more expensive because oil is more expensive right now.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:05:21] So it's not that the county is bad at trying to figure out where to spend money. In reality, I think the commission and the county and all of our elected officials work really hard to put forward requests for things that they absolutely need. And then really what we're dealing with are those same inflationary pressures that drive the other piece. And one of those biggest drivers for the county, just like it is for your local school district or for your local fire department, is that a big portion of our budget is driven by the personnel that we have, and these are people who live in Missoula County, work for Missoula County. We did a recent employee survey about 80 a little over 80% of folks said that the most important thing to them is the public service aspect of their job, which is fantastic. We love that kind of engagement from our employees, but we also have to be able to help them afford to live in our community as members of our community that work here. Because the best people to serve you are the people that are your neighbors, right? Who are right there to help provide those services. And so that's a really important thing.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:06:12] I want to give Chris just a little bit of a break. So talking about budgets and taxes can get kind of cerebral and detached from everyday experience. I heard you recently, Josh, tell a story of dropping in at Bernice's Bakery recently and having a conversation with someone. And it really struck me as a great example of how what we contribute to local government by way of taxes and incorporating that into our budgets really has a tangible connection to our day to day lives here in Missoula.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:47] Yeah, thanks. And I'm happy to retell this story. I was standing in front of Bernice's Bakery on a beautiful Sunday morning with the sun coming in. Bernice's Bakery is right here in Missoula on Third Street, right near Higgins, up against the river early in the morning on a Sunday. The sun kind of coming from the northeast. Very beautiful, still cool outside. And this gentleman recognized me. We interacted in the past and he was drinking his coffee and had a pastry in the other hand and felt comfortable walking up to me and saying, you know, we pay so much in property taxes and what do we even get for that? Really? Come on. Like, what have you done for me? I took a moment and then launched into a kind of a soliloquy on local government, and I'll try and do the same right now, blurring jurisdictional boundaries. And we are at the county. We're going to blur boundaries because local government and this guy just paid taxes. And truthfully, for this gentleman and most people, they don't care about jurisdictional boundaries. They pay taxes. They want everything to work. So the guy standing there with his coffee and his pastry and a little bit of a growl, I mean, like, really, what have you done for me? I said, the water in that coffee you're drinking is clean. You know, it's clean. You can drink it. It's brought to you, in this case by local government. And the pastry you're eating isn't going to make you sick because it was baked in a kitchen right over there that got inspected. And the people that work in that kitchen got paid a real wage.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:00] There's a rule, there's a law around all that. And here, look, we're standing on the sidewalk and it says 1931 on that sidewalk. Look at that. Local government built that sidewalk, and in 1931, I guess they did a pretty good job. And there's the street in front of us. Underneath the street is the sewer and water and broadband and utilities. And we're here in the beautiful shade of these boulevard trees that are probably 80 or 100 years old. The problem isn't that local government hasn't done a good job. The problem is that local government is invisible. We've come to expect that our society is going to be clean and predictable and safe and secure and high functioning, and it'll just be there when we wake up in the morning that this is our birthright because we are hard working Montanans. Well, I would say it's nobody's birthright. We have all these things because we made them so with an annual commitment, we commit to pooling our resources to creating this type of society that's taxes at work, that's local government at work, and that makes a foundation upon which the guy I was talking to can build his business or create cultural endeavors or really do whatever you like. If it were not for some of those things I mentioned, we would be spending a whole bunch of our time literally chopping wood and hauling water. But because we pool our resources and work together, we don't have to do that. We get this high quality society to live in. We've just done such a good job, we don't recognize it.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:19] Yeah, that's a powerful example. Thanks. Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:22] Thanks for prompting me

Juanita Vero: [00:09:24] I want to go back to another tightly held or North Star myth.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:27] Oh, a North Star.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:28] I like a North Star myth. That's a great phrase. You nailed it, Juan.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:32] "County government is funded mostly by taxpayer dollars." What do you have to say to that?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:37] Back to you, Chris.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:09:38] Yeah, so, so true and false, right? About a third of the county's budget is property taxes. Another third is grants. And then another third of that is what I'm going to call other revenue. And so by other revenue, I mean, it's things from fees that are collected for when you go in for a land use permit or a building permit to money that might be passed through from the state of Montana or the federal government. And without all of those things, we really couldn't do the projects that we do. And a really great example of that, Josh was just mentioning sewer over at. Bernice's bakery and roadways. Right. Those are two projects where we really rely heavily on our partners, both at the state level and at the federal level in order to be able to fund those really large scale infrastructure projects. And so if we look just to the south at Lolo, for example, major upgrades to the water system, major upgrades to the sewer system, both because it's a growing community and because they passed this amazing bond to build a new school, another investment in our social infrastructure that folks will soon forget that that new high quality school building that will serve residents and students for the next 50 years wasn't there ten years ago? Without those state and federal dollars, we really wouldn't be able to do those projects.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:10:45] And on average, Missoula County has really been very successful in getting those grants. And so for the Lolo sewer and water system, for example, about a little less than $1 million in local funds combination in this case of federal Arpa funding. So the American Rescue Plan Act funds and then also state funds went into that project so that folks in Lolo won't necessarily see a large increase in their sewer and water bill because they were covering those projects. The Sxwtpqyen area is another great example of that $15 million in investments, some local match in that, but not $15 million worth. If we were reliant on local property taxes, a project of that scale wouldn't get done. So really, like I said, it's about a third of our budget that's really property taxes and the rest of it is us chasing money, the state and federal level, and then also working with a lot of our partners at the state and federal level to bring funding in.

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:32] I'm really glad both of you guys brought this up. This came up at that city club presentation that apparently I'm not sure [00:11:38] I don't remember if this is coming out of the state government or where it's coming from. But apparently a metric out there is being used to measure the effectiveness of government by measuring spending and taxes. And there are charts and graphs floating around with, look, Missoula County spending went up 20%. Oh my god, they're out of control. Not noting, as you two just pointed out, that spending and taxation are not the same thing. Spending can reflect our ability to win competitive grants, to collect fees, to work carefully with our partners and to solve problems without using taxpayer money. Spending is only one piece of the equation where the money came from. Is it really essential piece if we are ever to do, as you pointed out, these really big transformational infrastructure projects, They can only be done with major federal grants on the books that will look like our spending went way up. [00:12:22] We're hoping to address the Highway 200 corridor. That's going to be a tens of millions of dollars project. I think eventually we're going to be successful. It will look like our spending went up. These are not local taxpayer dollars and this will transform life for people in the East Missoula area.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:12:36] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think that's a really good point. Josh And the other piece that goes with that is that spending is really cyclical, right? So that money comes in for Sxwtpqyen, for example, $15 million comes into our local coffers. That gets spent over two years. Our budget doesn't stay at that $15 million for that public works project. As those funds are spent off. It comes off the books, right? We don't stay at that level of funding. And so it is a really cyclical thing when you have those big infrastructure projects or when the community passes a bond to build something like the library, right? $30 Million to build the library, an amazing amenity for our community, providing so many new services both in and out of the city limits. It's a one time expense to build a building and then it comes down.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:15] Sometimes Missoula county is compared rightfully so, with the other major counties in our state. And people say, Oh look, you pay more and we pay more in taxes in Missoula, each of these counties has a pretty distinct demographic identity and different sort of tax burden, identity as to what entities are there, what are some of the things that make Missoula different than, let's say, Gallatin County or Yellowstone County?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:13:37] So I'll tell you, the biggest one that always jumps to mind for me is the fact that we have one incorporated municipality. You have just the city of Missoula here in Gallatin County. You have the fastest growing community, which is actually Belgrade. And then Bozeman is also a fast growing community. So they're providing their own fire, their own law enforcement, some of those basic level services where in Missoula County, we only have the city doing that. And so we're really providing as a county government services across a much larger geographic area without those incorporated cities to help shoulder that burden. If you want to think about it in one way. So you probably do pay a little bit more in Missoula County in order for us to be able to provide those services because we're providing them on a much larger scale. And it really goes back to we all pay in a little bit towards that service and that includes city residents because city residents are county residents. And then that funding actually helps to support the larger piece that we do. And so if you live in the city limits, you pay money to the sheriff's department. Now, your law enforcement primarily comes from the police department, but you pay into the sheriff's department because we have the detention facility. The sheriff's department is also responsible for serving what we call civil paperwork. Those pieces of paper that judges issue. That's all handled by the sheriff's department, even inside the city limits. But that also means that then those city residents are contributing a little bit towards folks who live in Lolo who get service from the sheriff's office or in Frenchtown or in Clinton or in Condon or Seeley Lake in order to help balance that. We're in a place like Gallatin County because they have those municipal municipal areas. The sheriff has to provide fewer of those services in more areas, right? Because those incorporated city limits do everything except for their civil paperwork. They're taking care of all of those. As law enforcement calls for theft, for vandalism, for other things that might happen in that community. What is the.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:13] Presence of a place like Big Sky due to the tax picture in Gallatin?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:15:17] First, there's the resort community that is Big Sky, which is split between two different counties. But what that really helps to do is bring in funding that can be used to offset property taxes for a lot of those large infrastructure projects. The other thing that it really does for that is because the values in those areas are so high and you have really kind of a resort-style communities that draw a lot of folks really expensive homes and those kinds of things. Again, they're contributing a larger percentage, which means other residents get to contribute a smaller percentage.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:44] That's a big one.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:15:44] Yeah, another myth. So keeping with the celestial theme, this is not a North Star myth. We'll call this a supernova myth. How about I love a supernova? So had one of our forebears, so had CP Higgins County commissioner from the 19th century, and his colleagues decided we're not going to grow government one bit from the 19th century, does that necessarily mean that the cost of delivering those services would remain static?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:16:13] It doesn't mean that they'd remain static. Certainly they would still go up because there's those same inflationary pressures that would happen or what would happen is you wouldn't be able to hire folks to perform those jobs, right? So if you think about what a justice of the peace might have been paid in 1930 versus what a justice of the peace might now need to be paid in order to be able to live in Missoula they're not equal. But the thing that would really happen, right, is citizens would have this huge opportunity cost. And one of the places we know that there are long wait times and they've done an amazing job shrinking the wait times with a lot of technology help and really great staff over in the Treasurer's office when you come to register your car. But if you think about the size of that office in 1930 when there might have been 2 or 3 people versus about the 17 or 18 people that help you now, how much longer would it take instead of that half an hour or 45 minute wait, if now all of a sudden we only had two people who were performing that task. So there would be a huge opportunity for cost for folks who might have to spend a day or maybe even multiple days that they might have to come back before they might get served and be able to register their vehicle, which is again, required by state law. Right. That piece that I always go back to, which is we are a division of state and we're performing tasks that the state has said, Hey, Missoula County, hey citizens, you have to do these things. And that places a burden both on the citizen, but also on us to make sure that we can adequately provide that service to folks.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:28] So if folks were wondering, the myth that was embedded in that is the notion that it's only by virtue of layering on additional services that gets us to a larger budget and ultimately more taxes to pay for those services. And that's not the case.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:17:43] It's not And I mean, one of the great things about Missoula is it's a growing community. And Josh has a really great analogy that talks about this related to growth. And I want him to be able to talk about that. But as we grow, as more folks come to Missoula, there is that need also to provide services to them, just like we provided services to folks who've been here for 30 years. And I remember Josh talking a lot about the fact that growth doesn't 100% pay for itself.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:05] Yeah, so we need more housing. We have a worker shortage. We have a housing shortage. If we can get more houses out on the landscape, hopefully we can slow the increase in costs of housing and we can hopefully find more places for workers to live. We're in a housing crunch and the cost of bringing services to a new home is not entirely met by the folks who live in that house. So we're in a puzzle here. We need new growth for all the reasons I mentioned. And yet new growth will cost us all money. That difference between what the folks who live in that new house pay and what the services actually cost. That difference is made up by everyone who lives here. So new growth costs us money and we need to grow. We're in kind of a vexing situation, a bit of a Ponzi scheme.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:46] I mean.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:18:48] It is a little bit of a pyramid that that those two things relate. Yep. And the fact that you have to grow or you really do see this, this decline that can happen.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:57] Yeah. I was going to mention also the mill cap. Without getting too weedy, we are limited on how much we can tax. Basically the limit goes something like this. You get to do what you did last year plus an increase that's equivalent to half the three year, half the three year average of inflation. Well, half the average of inflation is ridiculous. We don't pay that anywhere. We pay the full rate of inflation when we go buy tires or software or any other gear. And when we enter the marketplace to purchase people's time, their employment, again, we look at the market rate. We don't look at half the three year average of inflation. So this kind of begs the question, well, how do we remain in operation if we can only grow at half the three year average of inflation, even if we don't add a single employee or buy one new thing? Well, it's because we grow outside of that mill cap is where newly taxable property gets to reside for one year. So if we don't grow, we actually can't keep up with costs. And even as we grow, that costs people money. It's a terrible situation that.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:19:53] Really not that we have time today to get into this, but that brings up just the brokenness of our taxation system in the state of mind.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:01] Yeah. I wanted to ask Chris on this. There have been some solutions or potential solutions. Each, I believe, would be pieces of a puzzle, not the. One thing changes it all, but I wanted to get your opinion on this. We heard Dan Buck's the former director of the Department of Revenue, say the other day that of the 16 different property tax classifications in the state, he believed that some of them are not valued accurately, whereas residential property is valued accurately and the tax rate for residential property is pretty darn high at 1.35%. So high, in fact, that the Department of Revenue noted to the state in November that if the state wished to keep property tax growth flat, they should adjust that rate to 0.94%. And instead they chose to keep it at 1.35%. I've been told that, well, the tax rate for some of those other classifications are much higher than 1.35%. But the tax rate is only one piece of IT valuation. How much is that property valued is the other you put the two together equals a tax liability. Do you think there's real tax relief in this? Could we adjust the mechanics or the equations around valuation of some of those other property tax classifications or change the tax rate around residential or some of the other property tax classifications? How much relief would be there and what do you think that would do to our budgets? Yeah, that's.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:21:16] A great question. I mean, so I think there is a way to get to relief through that mechanism. Let me start there and the fact that when we look across all of the different tax classes and we look at some of the things that have changed at the state level, just in the time that I've been with Missoula County, it really is true that centrally assessed or those big corporations, those big providers across the state, really have been able to keep their taxes at a lower burden perhaps than they can. And so some examples of that, things like Northwestern Energy, which provides power throughout much of the state, some of our Internet providers, cell providers are all centrally assessed because they provide services in more than one community across the state. And so they're assessed at the state level and then broken up among the local governments for their portion of the taxes are ways that you could look at that. So when you look at some of those commercial industrial, there really has been this shift that's happened over the years where residential property has been in this reappraisal cycle, even under the six year reappraisal cycle where it's just done more often and in a very different and public way than the corporate side of property taxes is done. So I think there is the potential to get to relief there. I think the challenge that you always hear pushed back on it is that, well, those folks just pass those taxes on in the form of your bill that you get, whether it's Northwestern Energy or Spectrum as an Internet provider, as an example. But there's lots of different Internet providers, lots of different cell phone providers across the state. And that's true. But it is also spread out among those communities and among those ratepayers as a piece of that. And proportionally, that is really different than when you talk about residential property taxes or even those taxes that are paid by rental units, which folks sometimes don't think of as residential property, even though they are right and get passed on through rent, it is really different.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:57] So this telecom's, a lot of them are national organizations that nationally advertise their prices too. I haven't seen advertisements that say $49.99 a month for a cell phone package unless you live in Ohio, in which case it's $52. They just say this is what it is and they compete nationally. So it's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that if the values change of their cell towers in Montana, that they would decide to adjust their rates. And a piece of that that feels unfair to me. And I have to say, I'm a layperson, I'm not a tax expert. But the telecoms were given a break on what was called intangible value. So they own towers, and the towers are metal and steel and wire. Et cetera. But in order for these towers to really function and have a viable cell network, you need some pretty hard to come by licenses and some pretty intense computer software. Those things aren't valued. The value is just the metal and the wood and the wires to create the building. I feel like, all right, that's fine. But then residential taxpayers should be granted the same tax break on intangibles. And there's such an obvious one in our housing in that all of us live in houses where the value is not just the material that the houses are built of. You could take Dave's beautiful house and put it in a more rural county and it would be worth less just because of its location. The location is not a tangible asset, and yet it highly determines how valuable Dave's house is. In the same way with these telecoms, they're really valuable not because they have towers made of metal and wood, but because they can actually deliver cell service. And it feels like there's some fundamental unfairness here.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:24:29] Yeah, I don't think you're you're wrong. I mean, it's just it is it is one of those not to get too wonky, right? But it is one of those really difficult challenges is how do you put value on those items, those intangible items. And so it's done in a variety of different ways. If you look at the federal government, for example, cell towers being just one small example of this. But they do they have to license through the federal government, they have to purchase those channels that they that cell phones work on. So there are ways to value it. It's just updating our tax system to really reflect that as opposed to reflect kind of the historic nature that has always been there. And that's been true even traditional landline telephones. Right, those copper wire in the ground. Even that has changed over the years as we've moved away into different technology. It's really not copper anymore that's running every place, even though that's still what some of us think of it as. And so we've had to figure out new ways to really look at those things and figure out their value. I think that's one of the challenges for the state, is to figure that out.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:28] Is TikTok ccntrally assessed? No, It's illegal to download it in Montana. Yeah. Chris, we've been working on this budget for months.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:25:38] It feels like years.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:40] So we will soon be rolling out the preliminary budget. And then in September, early September, adopting our final budget. Anything that you would like folks to know about this process or other questions that you've heard raised that now is the opportunity to try to dispel additional myths?

Chris Lounsbury: [00:25:59] Yeah, so so the biggest one I think, for folks to know really goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is a lot of our spending is what we call one time, meaning we're going to do some large project or we've been working on some large project and it's not necessarily going to involve property taxes. And I will be one of your presenters at your preliminary and at your final budget, and I'll be talking about some of those numbers. And I'll do my best to remember to distinguish between those one time and those ongoing pieces. But those one time pieces aren't necessarily coming directly from property tax dollars. And so those are some of our big projects that folks will hear about, right? That will be in big stories. And I'll just name one of them. Now, as an example, we have a detention facility that's about 22 years old. It's an amazing facility run by incredible staff, managed very well by the sheriff's office. But it's also 20 years old, which means it needs some repairs. And so one of those repairs alone will be somewhere between 1.2 and $1.5 million. And that's a big and scary number. Those won't all come from local property tax dollars. Part of it will in the fact that we've been putting money aside for many years, knowing that eventually we will have to make these changes at the detention facility. Some of it will come from grant dollars that we have through the American Rescue Plan and other sources. But the thing to really make is that distinction between those kind of one time expenses and things that are ongoing. When we talk about ongoing expenses, those are the areas where we really try to limit to the absolute essentials that we need because we know that's affecting people's property taxes at home. And we do really try to always drive that number low as low as we possibly can while still providing the high quality public service that people expect of Missoula County.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:27:31] Thanks.

Juanita Vero: [00:27:31] How can folks get involved and learn more or more specifically, give us a great example of of of good involvement or useful involvement.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:27:39] Yeah. So I mean, I think there's great ways for folks to be involved. So first of all, always attending our budget hearing is great. So that's coming up on this Thursday. And then as Dave mentioned, our second budget hearing will be in early September. We do have that up on the Missoula County Voice page, which is another great way for folks to go and look at information and provide feedback. But really what we need to hear from folks is when we're considering those new things or when we're looking at our budget, what are the services that folks are looking for? I know it's easy to say, well, we should just reduce the budget, but where is it that you would want us to reduce the budget? Is it in roads? Is it in public safety? Where is it that you want us to look? Because really most of our departments run very lean. And so that kind of detailed information I think is important for folks to consider providing, especially as the three of you as the decision makers really sit down and weigh those decisions, because you all I know take to heart the reality that property taxes are not an easy thing for folks to manage in really difficult circumstances.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:36] Okay. Before we close, this is our favorite question or sorry, this is my favorite question.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:28:41] Uh oh.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:41] Um, share with us a good book or nugget of wisdom.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:28:45] I have been reading a book series which I've really been enjoying, which has absolutely nothing to do with work. Sorry in advance. Stephen Fry's series of Greek myths up through the Trojan War is simply just a fantastic read. If you enjoy not only Greek mythology, which I happen to enjoy, but Stephen Fry's delightfully wry sense of humor as he fills in some of the blanks that you wouldn't get from just a classic telling of the story. I'm listening to it as an audiobook series. It's a great listen. When you're out there running early in the morning, which I often do, and so really fun and so not necessarily particularly pithy, but awfully enjoyable. Good. Listen.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:22] Thanks for that.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:23] Thank you.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:24] Thanks a ton for all of this, Chris.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:29:26] Yeah, you bet.

Chris Lounsbury: [00:29:26] Really appreciate you guys inviting me on.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:28] Thanks. So tip of the spear will be taking a hiatus in September and we'll be back in October with some exciting new news. So stay tuned and have a wonderful September. Thanks for listening to the Tip of the Spear podcast. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you like. And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them. The Tip of the Spear podcast is made possible with support from better known as Missoula Community Access Television and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division. If you have a question or topic you'd like us to address on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.us and to find other ways to stay up to date with what's happening at Missoula County, go to Missoula.co/countyupdates and thanks for listening.