A Taxing Problem: How Stagnant Policies Burden Residents

Tax bills have landed in mailboxes and many residents are frustrated, confused and concerned. Why are property taxes so high? How did we get here? The commissioners discuss the topic of the tax system in Montana and what potential solutions could look like in this week’s episode of The Agenda.

Related links:

• What Do My Taxes Pay For?
• View your tax bill online
• The Re-Appraisal Process

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

Transcript

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Juanita Vero: [00:00:10] Welcome back to the agenda with your Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Juanita Vero and I'm here with my fellow commissioners Josh Slotnick and Dave Strohmaier. Today we're diving once again into taxes. Deep breath. Do a little breathe up here.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:27] Oh, this is a great topic.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:28] Should we ohm?

Juanita Vero: [00:00:29] As property owners, have recently received their tax bills in the mail.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:33] So including all of these property owners sitting at the table.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:37] Yeah, exactly.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:38] Your Commissioners.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:39] We all know Commissioner Slotnick is fired up and been beating some drums here. So where should we begin?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:46] How about with a letter from a constituent yesterday?

Juanita Vero: [00:00:49] That is a great idea. I'll paraphrase. We said back in September that the county was only going to be raising property taxes 5.4%. We were really proud of that because it was below the 7% rate of inflation. We were looking good. We were feeling good. It was still an increase, but we said no to close to $2 million worth of asks, and we worked super hard to keep it down to 5.4%. But then when everyone opens up their tax bills, they see that the Missoula County portion on their tax bill is something like 27%, in some cases higher than it was last year. 18%. Exactly. So W-t-f, what's going on? Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:31] So let me take a stab at that. And then Dave can jump right in and fill in behind. So your property taxes are the result of an equation with three big pieces. The first piece is the value of your house. Your house is valued by the state. They attempt to come up with a value that is 100% of market rate with some fancy software. They look at all kinds of data and decide how much is your house worth. And again, they're attempting to assess your value, to say that their determination of your house's value is actually 100% of what the market would say. That's their choice. This isn't carved in stone. The state could say, oh, we're going to do 80% of market rate, or we're going to do the rate of inflation, or they could choose anything. But for decades they've been using market rate. That's just what it is. The second piece of the equation is the tax rate. So you've got the value of your house and then the percentage by which your house is taxed. Important thing to note here there are 16 different property tax classifications. Things like forests and farms and heavy industry and light industry and retail and commercial. Residential is but one of those 16 different property tax classifications. And each classification has its own tax rate and its own valuation methodology. So for residential, it's market rate and for residential it's 1.35%. That's the tax rate. Those are the first two pieces of the equation. The third piece of the equation is how much money the county is going to ask for in taxes from all property tax owners, all property tax classifications. So this year, as Juan pointed out, we did ask for more in taxation from the county than we did in 2022. We asked for 5.4% more dollars in 2023 than we did in 2022. So how come somebody's taxes went up more than by 5.4%? It's because of the first two pieces of that equation. So to break it down, think of it as a pie. We expanded the pie in 2023 from 2022 by 5.4%. So the pie got bigger by 5.4%.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:03:39] And why did we do that?

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:41] We did that because we need to make sure that public safety continues and your roads get plowed and the elections work and animals get picked up when they need to be picked up by animal control and every other thing that the county does. And we did that as Juan pointed by less than the rate of inflation, which means we didn't grow government, we shrunk government. County government got a teeny bit smaller in real dollars. The pie got bigger by 5.4%. If you own a home, for the most part, I would say your portion of that pie got bigger, so you paid more than 5.4%. Now, why is that? Two big reasons. The first reason is due to the tax rate and the property tax classifications. A portion of the big pie goes to residential, a portion to forest, a portion to farm, a portion to industry, a portion to centrally assessed all the other ones. Most of the pie is going to residential and in fact more this year than last year. If you look at all the property owned in Missoula County, most of the property that's owned is owned as a home, as a residence. So the portion of the pie that goes that went to the residential property tax classification got bigger. Second piece of it, your slice of that portion also got bigger because your house went up in value. [00:04:48] Everybody's house went up in value because the real estate market soared, went crazy, and the state chose to assess homes at 100% of market rate. So in terms of the county, what are we left with as a tool to move things? We get to decide how much we're asking for. We ask for an increase of 5.4% from the entirety of the county. But we are pushing up against those other two pieces of the equation that are huge, super big. The value of your house and the rate at which your house is taxed. In a sense, imagine the whole tax system. It's a giant boat. It's a 60 foot tanker. It's just. And we need to make it turn right. We got a little weed whacker motor. [00:05:25]

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:25] We are only responsible. For whacking weeds within our lane of of the yards.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:31] So I don't have a metaphor here for the boat or the weed whacking. But, but, but who's the winner in this? Strohmaier, you talked about this earlier this morning because. Yeah...

Josh Slotnick: [00:05:41] If everybody's a loser, who's the winner?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:43] Well, there's no way to completely generalize because the legislature, for instance, could have made different decisions tax rate wise that would have accommodated this new reality we're in where we have escalating residential property values. They could have adjusted that.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:01] They have an opportunity to do that. They absolutely.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:06:03] Did. Yeah. They could have adjusted that downward. This is something that has happened in the past. They chose not to.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:12] I believe the Department of Revenue presented the legislature last November with an option. They said you could reduce the residential property tax rate from 1.35% to 0.94%, and if you did, residential property taxes would remain flat. Legislature took a pass. Now, when I first heard this, I thought, man, that legislature, they just want to give breaks to big corporations. They're being horrible. And then the other day I heard a legislator say, yeah, that's called the burden shift. And think about it, they're Missoula County. Where are you going to shift the burden to most all property in Missoula is residential property. There's nowhere to shift the burden to. We can't shift it back to industry industries gone. You can't shift it onto commercial. There's barely any in existence compared to the amount of residential property. I don't know, to the degree to which that's accurate, but I do know driving around it sure looks accurate.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:00] Well, yeah, I don't know. I heard that same presentation myself. There are other classifications of property in Missoula County, obviously, besides residential. I think it would be a useful exercise to to parse that out a little bit. I don't have the ability to do that right here, but of those other classifications centrally assessed, for instance, there are places within the and.

Juanita Vero: [00:07:25] Maybe remind folks what centrally assessed means.

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:28] Centrally assessed is when one entity owns property that crosses county lines. So the big ones in this category would be telecoms, pipelines, energy, airline.

Juanita Vero: [00:07:38] And railroad.

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:39] Airlines and railroads. There we go.

Juanita Vero: [00:07:41] So with something like a pipeline or a non electric transmission line that goes across the country, it's county. Well okay. Across the county sure. And across the state but then also across the country its contribution to Montana is so small. It's saying that that we should not contribute that much.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:03] So my understanding on how centrally assessed differs so much from residential property isn't just the tax rate. Primarily the big piece of the difference is the valuation methodology. So when your house is valued, when Dave's house is valued, it's considered at market rate. The owners of centrally assessed property do not have to count the intangibles when determining the value of their property, and in fact, they actually get to negotiate with the state for their property. So what would the intangibles be? Let's say on a telecom? Well, they own a tower. It's just a bunch of metal and maybe a little bit of wood and some wires. That's all there is to it. Well, you can have a tower and not have a cell phone company. You need to have some incredibly powerful software. Software that we couldn't even imagine, and some pretty intense and hard to get licenses from the federal government. Having that software and having those licenses, plus having the towers and having a marketing program means you can have a cell phone company. Those intangibles have real value. Now, there are intangibles in your house. I'm going to go out on a limb, Dave, and say...

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:03] Curb appeal!

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:03] You're very nice house. And you have a very nice house.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:06] It's that red roof.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:07] It's in a beautiful historic district. If you took that very same house and moved it to harden and hardens a really nice place, but your house would be worth a lot less. Location is an intangible and contributes powerfully to your value. The centrally assessed folks are allowed to subtract intangibles when determining the value of their property, hence the reduction in property value. They're paying 70% less because they looked at a cell phone tower and said, oh, you know that metal and the wood and the wire? It's worth two thirds of what it was last year that crap's just deteriorating, rotting on the vine. We're going to have to replace it all in 14 years. So it's not worth much. And that's all true. They're not accounting for the actual value of what makes that cell phone company a cell phone company. Having that incredible power and the proper licensure. A cell phone company is not just towers.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:53] So I'm glad we were talking about weed whackers earlier because we are really getting into the weeds here. So and so. So I want to come back to the the pie analogy. So 5.4% property tax increase for Missoula county's portion of your tax bill. Look at that 5.4% as a pie.

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:16] It got bigger by 5.4% okay.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:18] It got bigger by 5.4%. That is what we are responsible for in Missoula County. Full stop it is. And. And so beyond that. And this is not meant to simply do a traditional government pass the buck here. But that is the reality. That is what we are responsible for as fiduciaries here in Missoula County is making sure that we deliver services. And in this case, we tried our level best and we accomplished it by making that pie bigger by 5.4%, which is less than the rate of inflation. When it comes to what shows up on your tax bill, though, different choices could have been made in Helena that would have mitigated the tax burden, the property tax burden on residential properties.

Juanita Vero: [00:11:04] What needs to happen to actually get to 5.4%?

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:08] If a person can actually enjoy a reduction in their property taxes, a couple of big things would have to happen. One, the value of their home would have to drop considerably, and the tax rate on their home would have to drop considerably. And the tax rate on other property tax classifications would have to increase. And the valuation method on the other property tax classifications would have to more reflect reality. If those things happen. And we kept our increase of pie size to 5.4%, somebody would actually enjoy a property tax break. But as you pointed, Dave, we can only control the piece we can control. There's two pieces of evidence that I'm leaning into to think this whole thing is broken. The whole thing needs to blow, be blown up. 

Juanita Vero: [00:11:51] When you say the whole thing, what do you mean?

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:53] The whole property tax system. The way we've determined how to ask for people to contribute to the services that they receive, how do people pay for the services they receive? There's the big question. And different municipalities in different parts of the country do this in different ways. Not every place has a property tax. Some places have. They have all kinds of things. But here's the situation I believe we're in right now. People are paying way more than they can afford. Meanwhile, we increase the size of government by 5.4% in terms of dollars of taxation. We increased at less than the rate of inflation, which means we didn't keep up, which means we went backwards. We did not make investments in the future. We held the line because people are feeling so much pain. But I would say right now here in Missoula County, we enjoy a super high quality of life. We have fantastic amenities. It's safe, clean, predictable, high functioning, super desirable. Everyone and their cousin wants to move here, and that is to some degree, in part because people who sat at this table years ago invested in the future. We didn't invest in the future five, ten years, 20 years from now, people who live here will see that we didn't.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:59] Their roads will be crappier. They'll have less in terms of amenities. We did not invest in the future this year, and we did that because property taxes are so painful. And many people would say, man, you guys did the right thing. I'm bringing this up as evidence for how broken the system is, because we should be investing in the future so that people who are here in the next 20 years will enjoy the amenities that we enjoy. Instead, we made it harder for people in the future, and if the legislator we heard speak or present last week is accurate in his saying, you can't reshift the burden on property taxes in Missoula County, all you have are residents. There's no place to ship the burden to. Then, in fact, we got to try something else. That's what I mean. We got to blow up the system. And if I start throwing out ideas, I think people will jump on them and they'll be controversial, and I don't I'm not ready to do that. But just suffice to say, what we're doing right now, we the whole state is not working well.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:13:47] And just just think of it in any other sector beyond government, take the private sector. If you're a business and you are purchasing products, you are purchasing products for your business at the market rate out there, which tracks along at inflation, and you will pass those costs on to your customers. With us in local government, largely, the only ability we have to bring in revenue is through property taxes in the state of Montana. And it is, I would argue it's not sustainable if we want to invest in the future, to continually find ourselves in a position where we are funding at less than the rate of inflation every single year, what it is that we are delivering by way of services.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:32] So private business also prioritizes those who can pay the most. There are services go to those who can pay the most. So in government we're...

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:39] Trying to reach everybody.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:40] Yeah I don't know why. Why do we compare private business and government?

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:44] I think it's because we know private business.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:46] It's the exact but it just is not a good comparison because it doesn't. It doesn't. They have two different values.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:14:53] Or both subject priorities, same pressures of the market in terms of inflationary forces. So if we go down to pick your favorite tire store in Missoula, Les Schwab Tires over the years, the price of those items are going to be going up, whether we're government or in the private sector. We don't have the luxury or the ability to walk in and say, you know what, give me those for half of the rate of inflation.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:18] So I could imagine someone hearing this and saying, wait a minute, you're saying the thing is broken, but it's been in existence. [00:15:24] This system's been in existence as it is for. Be 40 years. If it was broken, somebody would have done something a long time ago. It's you guys that are the problem. So I would say 35 years ago it worked well. Why do they work? Because 35 years ago, Missoula County wasn't just a place where people lived. We had a thriving industrial sector that we don't. The idea of a balanced tax system existed 35 years ago. We had four mills right close to the city, and more smaller mills out into the countryside. And residential property wasn't worth very much. In fact, it was worth less than the national average. There was a time when it worked, but the times have changed economically. We are no longer an industrial blue collar place and our residential property values have soared. So in two ways. It is not 1995, in 2024, and we need to have a tax system that reflects the on the ground economic reality in 2024, not 1995. [00:16:16] And when we try and fit that square peg into a round hole, geez, it hurts. It doesn't work. That's where we're at right now. And I think a couple of years ago, this would not resonate with the state because, oh, it's Missoula County and Gallatin County. Who cares? Those are they're the wrong color. But now it's all over western Montana and it's all over central Montana. This disease, this affluenza, this everything's costing so much. Affluenza, affluenza. Every piece of real estate is soaring in value, which means an industry is retreating. This is becoming a place that's more of a destination to live and to visit than it is to have a factory. Now that this is a problem for people all over western Montana and central Montana, I believe the legislature is going to get much more interested in crafting a solution than they were when it was just Missoula County and Gallatin County.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:03] Just a slight change of theme here. And that is going back to the imagery of your taxes and and slices of a pie and such. One thing that folks get tripped up on is you get this tax bill with the return address on the envelope, or the place where you should send your taxes to Missoula County. Missoula County is but one of several taxing jurisdictions. And by taxing jurisdiction, I mean schools, fire districts, city of Missoula. If you live within the city limits, all of that goes into your overall tax bill. Missoula County, even though we have a treasurer's office that processes tax payments and the bills themselves, that does not mean that we take all of that money that you're paying and invest in things that you do not like outside of the city limits. So I think what's important there is that we are no different than the schools or any of these other taxing jurisdictions. We pulled up a tax bill the other day, I can't remember where it was from, but schools, they were seeing a substantial.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:09] 67%.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:11] Increase. And you'll see that across the board. So I don't know what I'm saying here. Misery loves company or.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:18] All.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:18] Of these entities are subject to the same set of forces around property tax. That is exactly.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:23] Right.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:23]  [00:18:23]And it hurts property taxpayers who are paying schools. It hurts property taxpayers who are paying for city government or county government or their rural special improvement district or their fire district. We are all playing by the same rules, which right now inordinately burden people who own residential property. This property tax system is horrible for renters because landlords in some cases have to there have cases choose to pass on increased taxes to their tenants. There are landlords out there. [00:18:52] There are mom and pop landlords out there who own property that doesn't really cash flow much, but it's an investment in their future. And if their taxes go up 35%, they're going to have to pass that on to their tenants or they wouldn't be able to make the mortgage on the building. I don't want to throw landlords under the bus any more than anybody else. This is this is going to affect all of us. And I'm hoping that the legislature will choose to address this. My concern is that it's so complicated that a few people who have an ideological ax to grind will be able to carry the rest of their coalition.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:19:24] So my understanding is we have a great web page on the county website, Missoula.co/taxes, that provides a bunch of valuable information that will help you decipher your tax bill. Juanita, do you have that in front of you right there? You could just describe what what you're looking at.

Juanita Vero: [00:19:44] So I mean, if you have questions about what are your taxes paid for, again, this is understanding how your property taxes are determined. Kind of runs you through that. What property reappraisals look like. And understanding that 2023 is a reappraisal year, we're going to talk a little bit about tax rate, the county budget and tax collection. And then again going through line items of what do all your taxes pay for. Check it out at Missoula.co/taxes.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:20:11] And I don't think it's an overstatement to say that had we not increased Missoula County government property taxes by 5.4%, folks would have seen a. Significant reduction in services. If if we kept it at zero, we'd have.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:32] To go backwards. We went up by 5.4% to maintain the status quo. Anything less than that going backwards. If we had not added one penny to our budget, your taxes would still go up precipitously because your home values went up, and because the tax rate on residential property is high, and because other property tax classifications saw a tax break. Put all those together. Your taxes are going up.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:20:55] Had we kept spending steady, that does not mean that you would have realized a zero increase in your taxes.

Josh Slotnick: [00:21:02] One of the things that the legislator who we saw present last week said was that any solution we do, we got to be able to make statewide. And this is very, very difficult because the economy in terms of taxes, is very different in Petroleum County than it is in Flathead County. And this is really troublesome. How are you going to come up with one solution that works everywhere? And my response is you don't. We should customize our tax system to match the economy of the place. And that may mean in Petroleum County, they have a different tax system than exists in Gallatin County, because fairness should be our preeminent value here. The tax system should be fair. It should be balanced among all entities, and it should be proportional in that the amount you pay actually reflects your ability to pay and what that looks like. The parameters of balanced and proportional will look different in Flathead County than they look in Petroleum County, because those two places are really different, and I think the legislature is looking under the wrong rock when they're attempting to find a solution that's going to work for everyone. And just as our legislature points at Washington, DC and says one solution doesn't fit all, don't try and make us Massachusetts. We need to look at Helena and say, one solution doesn't fit all. Don't make Missoula County look like petroleum.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:22] Well, it's like carry it to its logical conclusion, because right now, if I heard that same argument the other day and to some I kind of hear it, but to some extent I don't buy it because you basically need to take those 16 tax classifications and multiply them by 56 to have a unique 16 for each county. And we don't. So even right now there are kind of baked in incongruities between counties.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:50] But so absolutely they're absolutely they're baked in. We have counties that are primarily, if not almost entirely agricultural and good on them. That's awesome. It's wonderful that such places exist. And we have places like Gallatin County that are screaming hot residential places, and that's what they are. And they have spots within those counties like big Sky that are havens for $10 million homes. It's a completely different place. We are limited in terms of creating a new tax system. By our creativity. We can make this up. We need some people in Helena who are ready to do that, make up a new system.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:28] A more fair and equitable system. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:23:31] Balanced and proportional.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:33]  [00:23:33]Well, what we haven't done here is fully acknowledged the difficult position folks are in. And I don't know how to do that in a way that is meaningful, because the reality is that the system is not fair or balanced or equitable. But that's cold comfort when you're writing those checks and just know that we are doing our darndest to work in Helena to be better and and help craft a better system. [00:24:00]

Josh Slotnick: [00:24:00]  [00:24:00]Yeah, and I think we may get farther now than we ever have in the past, because we're not the only ones feeling the pain. [00:24:08] And I think there's going to be reception to new possibilities in a way that there wouldn't have been in the past, because this very same problem is being experienced by counties other than Missoula and Gallatin.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:24:22] It absolutely is the case that it may be cold comfort for folks and ourselves included, since we are property owners ourselves and sitting around this table. But and we talked about this earlier value, what sort of value are you getting for what you are paying? And if you want to see and and I don't know that there's any way around this, if you are okay with seeing a diminishment in investing in the future of delivery of services, that is really the only other option we have. And even at that, given what we've talked about earlier in terms of tax burden shift, we could cut down to no increase whatsoever and even slip backwards, and you would still realize a tax increase. But it boils down to what sort of community you want.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:14] How about some nuggets of wisdom? Okay.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:16] Yeah. So I was going to say on the nuggets of wisdom. So one of my favorite podcasts and I listen to at the end of the podcast, they do cocktail chatter, which means.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:24] Sounds like it sounds like ice. Included in a glass.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:27] So so I'm.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:28] Going to use some of their language and so on. The next time you're enjoying a cocktail sitting on your porch with your gopher shooting gun right there chatting with your workmates at the ranch, what are you going to be talking about?

Juanita Vero: [00:25:41] Oh, what am I going to be talking about?

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:44] That's the nugget of wisdom.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:45] Yeah. Now I'm distracted. Thank you. That's a that's a good that's a good nugget of wisdom.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:51] The next time. Okay. So the next time, Dave, you are in some beautiful small town bar across our gorgeous, wonderful state, enjoying the IPA of your choosing after chasing ungulates in the hills, what are you going to be chatting about?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:04] Boy, I'm going to try to do more listening than chatting. I think there's more to be learned sometimes by just absorption than necessarily being quick to share what I think is my own wisdom. So how's that for a non-answer? Good enough.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:21] One. Do you come across anything in books, movies? Podcasts? Newspapers?

Juanita Vero: [00:26:25] Yeah, unfortunately I had a had a friend die by suicide last week, and so it's been kind of a rough few days. She was well loved by the community. And when you're talking about the porch time and Dave, this listening, she was really good at that. And she had an ability to feel and describe the universe in magical ways. And and being present is one of the ways she did that. And so I'd like to emulate that and be present. And so when I'm on that porch with my friends, I think listening to the ice and the cocktail glass and watching the shadows and the light on the grass and the mountains, I think I'm going to pay attention to those moments.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:12] That's really good.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:27:13] How about you, Josh?

Juanita Vero: [00:27:15] Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:16] Yeah, it was a it was a rough week last week. So I knew the person that you were talking about, Juan and similarly had a friend through leadership. Montana died by suicide as well last week. And I remember having some pretty intense conversations with him about the pressures of this job and having people be angry, not fully informed. And that doesn't mean they're not smart. It just means they had only a piece of the story and really being angry and how to take that. And this guy's name was Matt Ulrich. And Matt had really good things to say and leaned into that Teddy Roosevelt man in the arena. And, you know, you can listen, but it takes a different type of oomph to get back up and keep getting after it.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:01] And keep getting bloodied, keep getting.

Josh Slotnick: [00:28:03] Bloodied and not to give up and hear what people are saying. And also to know it's one thing to throw insults from afar. It's another thing to be on the field giving it a shot.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:12] Yeah, yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:13] To Matt Ullrich and to Amy Coseo.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:15] Absolutely.

Josh Slotnick: [00:28:17] Thanks, everybody.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:18] Thanks, everyone.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:18] Thanks.

Josh Slotnick: [00:28:19] Thanks for listening to the agenda. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you use.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:27] 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.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:33] The agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners is made possible with support from Missoula Community Access Television, better known as mCAT, and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:45] If you have a.

Josh Slotnick: [00:28:46] Question or a topic you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.us.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:53] To find out other ways to stay up to date with what's happening in Missoula County, go to Missoula.co/countyupdates.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:00] Thanks for listening.