Vincent reflects on 2015 session

Sen. Chas Vincent’s last term in the Montana State Senate began with the opening of the 64th Montana Legislature this year. Vincent, who will be ineligible for future election to the Senate due to term limits, started his final term with some very technical and, in one particular case, controversial legislation.

Vincent chaired the Senate’s Water Policy Interim Committee between the legislative sessions, and three of the bills he passed this session were water-focused.

The first, SB262, was arguably the most controversial bill of the legislative session. The bill ratified the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Water Compact, a negotiation decades in the making. In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee March 12, Vincent said he changed his position on the bill after two years of working to make it better.

“The reason that I dove into the deep end of the policy pool,” Vincent said. “And spent over 500 hours, 600 hours, I don’t even know, I spent a lot of time of my life taking these arguments to ground, and I had a lot of them because I really, really, really wanted to beat this thing. And I can’t, I couldn’t. This agreement is good, it’s fair and it’s going to protect existing and future uses. That’s why I sponsored it. It was a leadership moment for me. I took on the job of trying to derail something and found out I had to conduct it when I got to the end.”

The bill passed both houses of the Legislature and was signed by Gov. Steve Bullock, but faces additional hurdles. A lawsuit has already been filed, challenging the bill’s passage, plus it must also be ratified by both the tribal council and the United States Congress.

Another water-related bill Vincent championed through the Legislature was SB57, which established performance benchmarks and guaranteed funding for the Montana Water Court through 2028.

Vincent said the bill was necessary for two primary reasons. First, he said, the bill provides job security to the personnel involved in water court adjudications, helping to ensure that decades of institutional knowledge is maintained. Second, the extended funding is tied to performance benchmarks, making sure the court fulfills its purpose effectively and efficiently.

“The bill makes sure we can keep the valuable institutional knowledge,” Vincent said. “But it also addresses the problem of decades of non-performance.”

The third water bill was SB97, which Vincent said was intended to remove some of the administrative burdens involved in the reclassification of waters by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

The bill allows the department to reclassify streams using modern science and modeling, instead of outdated methods and definitions. For example, Vincent said, there are streams that have been classified as being potential habitat for mollusks, although there are not, nor have there ever been, mollusks in the streams. The classification, however, adversely impacts the department’s ability to issue permits related to the streams.

Another bill Vincent spearheaded through the Legislature was SB48, which attempts to modernize the collection of data related to pseudoephedrine sales and limit sales in order to decrease the production of illegal methamphetamine.

Pseudoephedrine is the main ingredient used to produce meth, and its purchase is monitored by pharmacies and law enforcement. The monitoring in Montana, however, is manually conducted by means of logbooks at pharmacies and then on-site monitoring by law enforcement.

Vincent’s bill requires Montana to participate in a regional database of pseudoephedrine purchases. The database is already used in neighboring states and allows pharmacies to track, and to deny if necessary, purchases of the drug. When selling pseudoephedrine, pharmacists can consult the database to see excessive purchases in real-time, thereby preventing purchases instead of requiring law enforcement to manually check a logbook after the drug has been purchased and possibly already used in the manufacture of illegal meth.

Vincent also sponsored SB409, which modified the metal mines tax in Montana. The bill increased the amount of revenue generated from metal mines taxes to be shared with counties from 25 percent to 35 percent. The revenue is shared with Montana’s eleven hard-rock counties, including Lincoln County. 

The bill also includes a much closer-to-home impact for Lincoln County, diverting approximately $600,000 per year from the Zortman-Landusky fund to off-set the long-term operations and maintenance costs of the Libby Superfund Site after the Environmental Protection Agency closes the active phase of the cleanup. The funds will be diverted beginning in 2018, after the Zortman-Landusky fund hits its full appropriation. EPA’s active cleanup in Libby is expected to last another three to five years, so the fund should be diverted before the site enters into operations and maintenance and the financial burden shifts from the federal government to the state and/or county.

Vincent said he evaluates legislation with three main questions. Is this the proper role of government? If so, does the legislation properly address the issue? Finally, does the bill fund the mandate in such a way as to ensure success?

Vincent said the highlight of this session was passing the water compact ratification.

“I invested so much time and energy making something workable out of something that initially wasn’t,” he said. “But leadership is about making the best decisions you can. When I first started in the Legislature, I told myself in the mirror, ‘I am going to do what is right, when it’s right.’”

Vincent hopes, when he’s finished in the Legislature, people remember him as a lawmaker who put personalities aside and worked hard to understand the legislation on which he voted. 

“The only legacy that I want to be remembered by is that I knew what I was voting on, that I educated myself about the issues,” he said. “I want to be known as the guy who could separate personalities from politics.”