Job creation a top priority for SD2 incumbent

Running unopposed for reelection to her Senate District 2 seat, Dee Brown, R-Hungry Horse, will enter her second term next year, barring a successful write-in candidate opposing her campaign.

The former school teacher said in an interview Tuesday that as a legislator she prefers to focus on amending good bills to make them better, rather than sponsoring a deluge of measures each session. She also prides herself on maintaining lines of communication with her constituents, and frequently calls business owners and other community leaders within her district to get their take on an issue.

“I have a large enough network that if I don’t know the answer to that, I’ll give someone a call,” Brown said. “I taught school too long not to look at both sides of an issue, but when I make up my mind it’s for a good reason and I can always defend it to the people who don’t think I made a good decision, and to the people that think I did.”

Brown has represented the district, which includes Columbia Falls, the North Fork and the U.S. 2 corridor past Essex, for four years. Previously, she spent four terms in the House before reaching the term limit.

Most of her votes through the 2015 session sided with the majority of Republicans in the Senate, but her own initiatives focused principally on local issues. Brown plans to revisit bills that failed to gain traction last year, including one that would limit the use of de-icing chemicals on Montana’s roads and another that would have appropriated about $300,000 from the state bed tax collections to create and maintain a Montana trade center in Calgary.

“I see our northern neighbors as just a huge market we haven’t fully tapped into,” she said.

Brown’s district includes Columbia Falls, a town in which recent economic struggles have been compounded by the August closure of two lumber mills acquired by Weyerhaeuser earlier this year.

She said the top issue facing her constituents is jobs — specifically those that pay well. Brown believes the supply of service- and tourism-related jobs are not providing the wages enjoyed for decades by workers at Plum Creek and the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co., and she would like to eliminate the state’s business equipment tax to encourage more manufacturing companies to return.

“Until we get away from the business equipment tax, we’re always going to have these types of businesses go to neighboring states,” she said.

She also wants to see more active management of nearby forestlands and supports legislation to force a return of federal Forest Service land to the state. While she would vote for a bill to do so, Brown gives more priority to measures that take a slower, more targeted approach to state management of public land.

“Let’s not sell them, let’s manage them,” Brown said. “I don’t think we should take all the lands, I think you should take critical lands that need managing.”

She also would like to reform Montana’s property and income taxes, arguing that the current tax structure pushes out families and contributes to the state’s aging population. While she doesn’t hold out much hope for significant changes to the law under Gov. Steve Bullock, she specifically endorsed two bills vetoed by the governor last session: a property tax reform bill sponsored by Sen. Bruce Tutvedt, R-Kalispell, and an income tax reform measure pushed by Rep. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell.

With an infrastructure spending bill likely to reemerge next year after similar measures failed during the past two sessions, Brown said she wouldn’t have voted for the bill that failed in the House during the waning days of the 2015 Legislature.

She voted for the version initially passed by the Senate, but blamed the Democrats for amending it with additional projects and said they refused to find a middle ground.

“I don’t believe infrastructure means buildings,” she said. “When you talk compromise, I take umbrage with that, because it doesn’t go both ways.”

Brown takes conservative positions on minimum wage increases and state-funded pre-kindergarten, both of which she said she would oppose. She said her number one priority when she heads to Helena will be measures she believes will promote job creation and reinvestment in communities back home.

“They’re the ones that have kids going to our schools, and that are basically paying the bills,” she said.

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