Rep. Cuffe charts new ground during legislative session

Rep. Mike Cuffe, who just finished his third session in the Montana Legislature, still carries with him a postcard from his first campaign in 2010. The card, he said, is a reminder of his principles and the promises he made to Lincoln County voters when he first sought public office.

The card touts Cuffe’s conservative values and commitment to fiscal responsibility, including a promise of no new taxes under his watch. During this past session, that promise put him at center-stage in a battle with Gov. Steve Bullock about the state’s priorities and how to best address them.

Cuffe was cast into the middle of the fight due to his selection by House leadership as chairman of the Joint Subcommittee on Long-Range Planning. The subcommittee, part of the House Appropriations Committee, was tasked with reviewing the governor’s massive Build Montana Act, HB5.

The act, with a price tag of more than $400 million, sought funding for a number of construction and infrastructure projects around the state. Cuffe compared the bill to a famous hamburger from a restaurant in Eureka, the “Bubba Burger.”

“It looks good, but it’s just too big to chew and too much to swallow,” Cuffe said. “It’s also impossible to digest.”

Because the governor was adamant about maintaining a $300 million general fund balance, a large portion of the $420 million appropriated in HB5 was to be paid by debt financing, which is what Cuffe couldn’t swallow.

“I thought there was a lot of this we could pay with cash,” Cuffe said. “Why couldn’t we take some of that cash and put it into the program to reduce the amount of bonding dollars?”

Cuffe said the bill also mixed up infrastructure projects like roads and bridges with projects that were more capital improvement-type projects, such as museums and university buildings.

Cuffe said his subcommittee worked on the bill for 34 days, trying to find ways to fund vital projects without increasing the state’s debt load, but the governor’s office was not willing to negotiate on the package.

“We were pushed into an eat it all or shove it all away situation,” Cuffe said.

In the end, the legislature rejected HB5, but did appropriate money for several infrastructure projects around the state.

“We funded about $100 million in infrastructure projects, but there were some good projects that didn’t get funded because we just didn’t have the money.”

Cuffe also pushed HB145, the Grizzly Bear Livestock Mitigation Bill, a bill that passed but from which a significant amount of funding was stripped.

Under a law passed by the Legislature in 2013, livestock owners are eligible for compensation when their animals are killed by grizzly bears. Cuffe’s bill expanded this to include up to $200,000 in grant funding to help property owners invest in non-lethal preventative measures, such as electrified fencing.

The end-game, Cuffe said, is to delist the grizzly bear. When bears attack livestock, they are often either killed or relocated, which then reduces the number of bears in the ecosystem and contributes to the threatened status. By mitigating those encounters, the bear population can increase and then be removed from the threatened species list.

The governor issued an amendatory veto of the bill, removing the new funding from the non-lethal prevention grants. Should the fund have excess money after claims for livestock compensation have been paid, grants could be made available, but no new funding was added to the project during the 2015 legislative session.

Cuffe said the bill, even without the funding for non-lethal prevention, is a good start.

“We established the non-lethal program in the law,” Cuffe said. “We got the framework in place, we just didn’t get the funding this year.”

Another bill pushed by Cuffe could, if successful, result in a substantial financial windfall for the state and for Lincoln County. The bill, passed and signed by the governor, seeks to amend the Columbia River Treaty in order to compensate the state and county for storing flood waters behind Libby Dam. 

The dam, Cuffe said, creates a number of financial benefits downstream on the Kootenai River, especially in the area of power generation. Other dams downstream are able to generate power because of the quantifiable and reliable flows coming through Libby Dam.

British Columbia Hydro and Bonneville Power Administration generate massive amounts of electricity from the Kootenai River because of the Libby Dam, but no compensation has been provided to Lincoln County or to the state of Montana for the land swallowed up by the lake because of the dam’s construction.

In Canada, British Columbia Hydro was required to establish the Columbia River Trust, a fund that provides millions of dollars to the local economies around the lake on the Canadian side. Cuffe’s idea is modeled on the same principle. He anticipates a similar trust paying a percentage of the revenue from power generation to the state of Montana, with 80 percent of those funds being sent to Lincoln County.

Cuffe said he is not asking for retroactive payment or reparations, just fair payment for the loss of land and ongoing benefits derived by those downstream from the loss of land in Lincoln County.

“This is not welfare,” Cuffe said. “It’s a square deal. It’s compensation for a service rendered.”

Cuffe’s most memorable achievement during the session, however, didn’t come from the legislation on which he worked. Cuffe worked with several state department and agency heads to put together an informational session for local elected officials and economic development representatives.

The meeting, Cuffe said, grew out of Lincoln County’s economic woes. The county has long held the state’s top spot in unemployment and poverty statistics, something Cuffe wants to change.

Cuffe said the idea was to have officials from Lincoln County meet, face-to-face, with state officials and learn about programs and funding options available to assist the county. The meeting was the first of its kind in Montana, Cuffe said.

“Nothing like this has ever been done,” he said. “It was a great introduction not just to what’s available but also the chance for Lincoln County officials to look the responsible state people eyeball to eyeball and get to know each other.”

Montana law prevents Cuffe from serving more than four terms in the House, so he has one term remaining, should he be re-elected in 2016. Cuffe seems committed to running again in 2016.

“I expect I’ll be running again,” Cuffe said. “As long as I think I’m contributing, and I believe I am.”