Sen. Vincent summarizes Legislature

If you think you had a busy spring, consider the plight of Chas Vincent, who works a full-time job as a consultant, serves as a senator in the state Legislature, and just welcomed his fourth child into the world.

That kind of schedule requires a lot of priority juggling, even for high-energy people like Vincent and his wife, Michelle.

“To be honest with you, it has been a blur for the most part,” Vincent said. “The four months – four months is a long time, but it actually went by faster because of the pace at which everything is going. I was still able to get a lot of good things done in the Legislature.”

The 2013 legislative session was Vincent’s fourth, making him one of the longest-serving current members of the Montana Senate. Considering his role as a legislative veteran, he holds positions of high authority on several committees that shape new laws.

This session, Vincent was chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee. He also served on the Select Committee on Pensions, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee, and the Senate Rules Committee.

While Vincent said he was pleased with some of the new laws that were passed this year, he also criticized the Legislature for overspending and for wavering on pieces of legislation that would have solved longstanding problems statewide.

Vincent, who represents District 1, including Lincoln County, also had a few choice words for Gov. Steve Bullock, who was able to wrangle several Republican lawmakers into his corner when it came time to vote on the state budget.

Here are some excerpts of The Western News’ recent interview with Vincent. A longer version of this question-and-answer session will be posted online at www.thewesternnews.com.

You are a lawmaker, a father of four and a consultant. Tell me about your day job.

I was raised in a logging family, but the sawmills went away, and there went that future for me. We still have some equipment and do some things from time to time. But, primarily right now, my bread and butter is consulting.

I work for Environomics, which is a public relations, government relations, research firm. We work primarily with private interests that are working to responsibility develop natural resources. We help them with their permitting processes, and we help them with the outreach in the communities that they impact.

That's my 9-to-5 job. I like to say that it's 9 to 5, but I don't know what those hours are. One of the beauties of being a consultant, though, is that I have flexibility and can go on sabbatical for four months while anchored down to the Legislature, which is a rarity for someone my age.

That's while a lot of the folks in the Legislature are typically older or retired. While there is more young blood in the Legislature in the last five years, we are still a significant minority. I am blessed to have that flexibility in my private life, in my private work, to be able to take a sabbatical and still have a job when I come back.

From what I understand, the Legislature concluded its business just in time for you to see your fourth child come into the world.

I was home just an hour before Michelle went into labor. So, Cash, my new son, was on schedule too. He was working with me. I couldn't have asked for better timing.

In the later part of the session, the biggest concern, of course, was that I wasn't going to be able to get home in time for the delivery. And I really wanted to be there. It worked out great.

The timing was almost too good to be true.

It was miraculous. My truck wasn’t even unpacked, and Michelle said she thought she was in labor. We were blessed that every thing went right.

I was blessed to have the support at home. First, Michelle, taking on the single parenting role while I am gone. We couldn't have done it without the family that we have surrounding us, on both sides. They all stepped up and helped fill the gaps. WIthout family, I couldn't do Helena – or, you know, do it right.

This was your fourth legislative session. So, tell me, in general, do you feel like state lawmakers got a lot done this year?

I think we did take a few big policy steps in what I would consider the right direction.

For instance, we were able to successfully lower the business equipment tax, by raising the threshold, for about 13,000 businesses. I would have like to seen the elimination of that tax completely, but that wasn't in the cards this session.

We were able to pass some policies on the natural resource front that will help aid our school trust land revenue and, in turn, create some additional revenue for the schools by responsibly developing the states natural resources.

You did some work on water issues, as well, right?

We took a really big step on the water front on exempt wells, which is a pretty controversial issue. Anything to do with water is controversial.

It’s not really an issue in our neck of the woods because of our abundance of water and the land uses. But in some places in the state, we are having a collision, if you will, of development and traditional agricultural land uses. They are colliding.

You have development that is moving outward, say like in the Gallatin Valley around Bozeman, where they are subdividing and developing what used to be irrigated land for growing crops. So you have a situation where you have these exempt wells that in some places are having adverse effect on other people’s in-stream water rights that they use to irrigate their fields.

Wells are exempt as long as you are less than 35 gallons a minute or 10 acre feet. You can drill a well and pump that water and consume it however you like without going through a permitting process to see if the use of that water is going to affect anybody else.

It has been an issue since before I got in the Legislature. So, I sponsored a bill that addresses that.

So, how did that bill change state law?

What it is going to do is this: If you are going to acquire a water right in one of the seven closed basins in the state – those are areas where it has been determined that water has been over-appropriated – you are going to have to prove that you are not going to hurt anybody else.

What some folks are wanting is a prohibition of exempt wells in those closed basins. But we all know, everybody that has been studying this issue, that exempt wells really only consume, meaning that it evaporates and goes away from the aquifer, very small amounts. Most of it goes back into the aquifer and recharges the system, so it doesn't' have an effect. 

What happens is that when you get an aggregate, in certain types of geology, water can be pulled and moved really fast and easy. When you get a bunch of people dipping straws in a cup, if you will, everyone is sucking and that 1 percent or 2 percent, cumulatively, can have an impact.

So I created a process by which a surface water-right holder, if they petition to have a study done and it shows that there could be an impact, would be able to make a call to those who own an exempt water well in that reach and tell them they will only be able to take out 20 gallons a minute, two acre feet.

What it says is that those senior water right holders at the time of high demand in August, when they are doing their irrigation, when they need the water the most, they can make a call on those houses and say, “Hey folks, quit watering your lawns.” By doing that, they are going to mitigate that cumulative effect by saying you can still use your water for drinking and your washing machine and all that stuff because it all goes back into the ground anyways. But we are not going to allow you to water your two acres of lawn in the middle of August if it's going to have an effect on these guys who have a right to use that water during the irrigation season.

It is the first significant change to exempt well law since the passage of our constitution back in 1972. Nobody was wiling to go there to change anything.

This is all brand new. The DNRC is going to notify everybody. This will allow a subdivider or somebody when they began to buy a house in this area to say “Hey, you are buying a chuck of land, building a house, there is a chance because of where you are building, that come July or August, you may have somebody make a call on your watering because you are in an area where water pulls really easy in the aquifer.”

What bothers you most about this year’s legislative session?

I think that we failed this legislative session as far as big opportunities. We missed an opportunity to fix our unfunded liabilities and our state employee lifetime retirement packages.

We have a responsibility to keep all the promises that we made to every current and existing employee. Those promises cannot be broken and need to be upheld. But we missed the opportunity to fix the problem that created the unfunded liabilities, moving forward.

What we did was some of the formula gimmicks that were used to come up with a fix that was passed. But it really wasn't a fix because there will be litigation that challenges it. I think the courts will determine that it was a violation of contract laws.

Here’s what we really need to do: Instead of doing a defined benefits plan, we need to go to a defined contribution plan. We should keep existing employees at the levels that we promised when they were hired.  But then anybody new coming on should be on this new system, which would be similar to a 401K, structured like the private sector. It would reduce liability of future taxpayers in the state by doing that.

All we’re doing right now is continuing to kick the can and not really solve the problem. Every state in the nation is wrestling with this. So we will be back again on this unfunded liability discussion. It is approaching $4 billion.

What do you think about the budget that was passed? You voted against it, if I remember correctly.

I think we also had a huge missed opportunity with keeping our ongoing spending in a more fiscally responsible manner. We increased state spending with the budget. That was one of the bills I didn't vote for.

I voted against House Bill 2, which is the main budget that included a 13 percent increase. Unfortunately, because the Legislature couldn't get it's priorities in line, the governor ended up vetoing some of the most important spending that we needed to do, which is on the east side of Montana where cities are seeing this influx from the oil and gas boom. They need the infrastructure, they need sewage, and they need schools. That is also where companies are going to come and ask what kind of schools do you have, do you have housing for enough of us if we come over there.

They needed this help, and the governor vetoed those bills because he wanted $300 million dollars in the bank and we handed him a structurally imbalanced budget.

In the end, the budget was improperly prioritized. The governor, while I disagree with his veto, I disagree with the overall spending package as well. It spent more than it took in, and that was why I voted against it. It was fiscally irresponsible.

How much of a spending increase was included in the budget that was passed?

It was 13 percent prior to his vetoes. With his vetoes, it is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 11 percent.

So, the governor has line-item veto power? Is that what happened with the budget bills?

Yes, some of the bills were separate bills, funding bills that he could just veto out right. And he also line-itemed some stuff in the budget as well. He made a claim that he wanted so much grain in the bin so that he could end up being on the fiscal right of the Legislature.

The reality is that if we would have passed everything he had asked for in the State of the State (address), we would have been way underwater.

The governor got almost everything he wanted, and he ended up vetoing a lot of bills that some folks thought they were getting by cooperating with him. But that's politics.

There are a lot of towns on the east side of Montana that are in an uproar about it because they very clearly needed some state help in infrastructure, and if we are going to spend money anywhere it should have been there.

North Dakota is going through the same thing. They waited way too long to address the issues in the western part of the state.

And now they are putting billions into it.

The industries that are coming to those areas are willing to help build that infrastructure. But when they see nothing coming from the state, they will go to North Dakota instead of going somewhere that they have to build the infrastructure. It's a bottom-line calculation.

The state needed to show that we want their business. Even legislators such as myself, on the opposite end of the state, recognize that, gee-whiz, it would increase spending. But, for crying out loud, it’s a pretty loud signal to the industry that the state really doesn't care.

I was intrigued to hear the governor, a Democrat, say during the budget hearings that the Republican-led Legislature’s budget proposal included too much spending. What do you make of that?

First of all, I would agree that there was too much spending in the budget that was passed, and that's why I voted against it.

Secondly, I find it difficult to understand his statements when, if you look at what he was proposing for us to consider, we would have spent far more money than was handed to us.

Unfortunately, when these bills were passed, they were passed with all the Democrats and some crossover votes of Republicans in the Senate and the House. 

So, the governor vetoed some of the budget items that Republicans wanted when they agreed to cross party lines and vote for the budget?

Yes. Like the research and the agriculture and the money for the oil and gas counties. A couple million here and there, he vetoed.

Do you think lawmakers will be going into next session with their eyes wide open?

I certainly hope so. Some of those who thought they were negotiating in good faith toward some outcomes that they thought were desirable, they certainly got a wake up call.

Who was the big winner this session? The governor or the Legislature?

I would say fiscal responsibility is what lost.

We had 10 guys in the Senate and a little posse in the House who voted for everything he wanted. And, in the end, they got the shaft - not all of them, but nine out of 10 of them.

I don't want to beat up on my own party. I try to follow Regan's 11th commandment - thou shall not say evil of another Republican – but the problem is, are they Republican?

Some of these things, it was really difficult to watch and to be a part of and be able to hold the line on a responsible budget. It was frustrating seeing the lack of unity and desire to achieve that end.

Did the Legislature do anything significant with the state tax code?

We passed one simple tax code bill that was vetoed.

We have so many different tax credits and different ways government has determined winners and losers through tax policy. The bill that was vetoed attempted to do away with a lot of the state-created tax credits, but left the federal ones in place.

The only way we are going to have fair, flat and low-tax policy, state or federal, is to take government out of picking winners and losers. You end up with people lobbying for special consideration to avoid paying the taxes that other people have to pay.

What makes one corporation better than the other? The type of gadgets that they make? Really? Just because they have more political favor and ability to get something on the books? 

So we removed a lot of that. And by removing a lot of that, we were able to lower everybody's tax rates. That bill didn't increase taxes, it just changed the bell curve a little bit and it lowered the overall, from 6.9 percent income tax to 6 percent. But it required people that were getting preferential tax treatment to basically belly up like everybody else has to.

It was a tax fairness bill, supported by a lot of folks. But the bill was vetoed. I'm sure the bill will come back. Maybe it will have a different outcome next session.

You are a fiscal conservative, but how would you characterize yourself on social issues?

I’ve got a Libertarian streak that runs through me, so I tend to look at a lot of things through a role of government perspective. And government, as far as I am concerned, its role is essentially to protect you from me and me from you, but not me from myself and you from yourself.

Anytime government tries to legislate morality or tries to legislate stupid, it fails. You cannot do it. No one has ever been able to do it. You start impinging on other people’s freedoms to guarantee you are not going to have certain outcomes, and you are not going to get there anyways.

Do you find it difficult to work with lawmakers who don’t necessarily agree with you?

You have to be willing to sit down and look through someone else's worldview and try to understand why they think a certain way. You have to have the courage to do that. You have to have the convictions of your own principals and your own compass to look through someone else's worldview.

If you don't have the courage of your own convictions, what happens is people won't look through other people’s worldview because they are scared it will change what they know to be true.

What you have to do to be an effective legislator is to know who you are and be willing except some tweaks and some changes to maybe how you perceive policies that impact other people. If you don't have the courage, you will never understand why another policymaker has different opinions than you do, and then you will never find that 20 percent that you might agree upon.

Some people, including lawmakers, often refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees with them.

Looking through someone else’s worldview helps you hone your own in a lot of ways because you know better why you feel the way you do. Some policy makers refuse to do that. They say “This is what I believe, you will never change my mind, I don't want to hear it, get out of my face.”

On some issues I find myself doing that because I have been here four times and am well versed in the decisions on either side of the issue. But on Issues that are fundamentally new or something you haven't thought about, you better be sitting down and listening to all perspectives of something to make sure you are right.

When you are in Helena and you ask someone how they voted on that issue, the next question should be why did you vote like that. And if that person can’t tell you why, that person isn't doing their job.

When you talk with people on the other side, you are going struggle to find 5 percent of things that you can agree on. And I do struggle to find 5 percent on the Democratic side. I struggled to find 80 percent, sometimes this session, on my own side.