Gianforte visits Whitefish to press for less regulation

Halfway through a 61-town, three-week campaign tour, Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte stopped at the Great Northern Brewing Co. in Whitefish Saturday morning to ask local residents what state regulations they would like to see on the chopping block.

The Bozeman businessman has made high-wage job creation the cornerstone of his campaign, and is using his “regulation roundup” tour to criticize a regulatory environment that he said has created unnecessary barriers to new businesses getting off the ground in the Treasure State.

“We’re going to round up all these regulations, and when I’m governor we’ll take the excessive ones and put them out to pasture,” he told the half-dozen Flathead residents who attended the meeting.

If elected, he said he would support legislative initiatives to roll back regulations, as well as using his administrative rule-making authority and replacing state department heads with individuals with more private-sector experience.

In natural resource-dependent Northwest Montana, Gianforte blamed regulatory over-reach for the loss of hundreds of timber jobs and more than a decade of environmental review for the proposed Montanore Mine near Libby.

The state Division of Environmental Quality announced partial approval of the mine’s permit earlier this week, but held off on issuing a water quality permit until it receives more public comments.

“Creating high-wage jobs starts with responsible natural resource development,” he said. “I don’t think we should approve every permit that gets applied for, but we should be able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ faster… It’s an endless cycle.”

After the meeting, he noted that he was not in favor of proposals to transfer ownership of federal lands to the state, but said more could be done to increase state management over federal forests. As governor, he would do more to pressure the Forest Service to approve rules on categorical exclusions under the Farm Bill, he said.

“The state does a pretty good job of managing state lands,” he said. “If we could get timber harvest from 100 million board-feet per year to 300 million, we could get our mills back to full production.”

Robbie Holman of Whitefish, the retired former owner of Kalispell-based Holman Aviation, said health-care costs have pushed businesses to keep fewer full-time employees on staff.

“There’s a lot of people that are working, but they’re working less because of this law,” Holman said.

Gianforte responded with a football analogy, saying he would focus on “three- and four-yard passes” to target more cumbersome portions of the state’s health-care laws, such as limits on medications moving across state lines.

Jeanie Konopatzke, who co-owns Great Northern Brewery with her husband, said she hadn’t found any specific problems with the current regulatory environment for her business.

“I asked our manager and he couldn’t come up with anything,” she said. “We don’t have any trouble recruiting good people. Everyone wants to move here.”

Gianforte offered up education-based solutions to create a more qualified worker pool for high-wage jobs in the state.

He cited his charitable foundation’s scholarship program and support for high school computer science programs as ways to increase the state’s base of qualified tech industry employees. Computer programming language courses could be offered as an alternative to foreign languages in public schools, he added.

At the end of the meeting, Gianforte reiterated his pledge not to accept campaign contributions from outside spending groups, a challenge he has criticized Bullock for declining.

Democrats have countered that despite the rhetoric, Gianforte donated thousands of dollars to groups that fought against the “dark money” disclosure bill passed during the 2015 legislative session, which requires some outside spending groups to disclose their donors.

Asked about those donations, the gubernatorial candidate said they were charitable contributions, adding that “influence occurs when you receive money, not when you give money.”

He declined to say whether he personally supported the dark money bill.

“I’m in favor of transparency in elections,” Gianforte said.

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.