Gianforte criticizes Dem attacks on job record

During a Thursday editorial board meeting with the Daily Inter Lake, Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte criticized his opponent while dismissing attacks on his record of job creation and stream access.

Gianforte has largely run on his record as a successful businessman in Bozeman, frequently citing his former company RightNow Technologies, which he sold to Oracle in 2011 for $1.8 billion.

The Montana Democratic Party has charged that despite his job-creation rhetoric, the company outsourced jobs while Gianforte was at the helm. He has also faced recent criticism over a 2009 Forbes article stating that RightNow was taking “the concept of outsourcing to new levels.”

“It didn’t mention anything about foreign jobs,” Gianforte said Thursday, saying instead that the outsourcing in the article referred to jobs the company’s service had brought to Bozeman. He added that the state Democrats had issued an apology after they were sued for making similar claims in 2012.

Gianforte also criticized Democrats for claiming he had sued the state in 2009 to block public access on his property. Gianforte said the dispute was simply over where an existing easement was located.

“We did have a dispute with Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with access,” he said.

The Bozeman Republican said in traveling the state throughout the past year, the top issue of concern to Montanans is a lack of well-paying jobs in the state.

As part of his solution, he said Northwest Montana would benefit from increased timber supplies and reiterated his criticism that Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock failed to use tools available to him to increase harvest on federal forestlands.

“I would use the Good Neighbor Authority,” he said, referring to a measure in the 2014 Farm Bill that allows for increased collaboration between state and federal foresters on forest management projects. “The governor sat on his hands for close to three years with that tool available.”

In order to diversify small, natural resource-dependent economies like Columbia Falls, he also proposed increasing access to apprenticeships and internships to grow the skilled labor pool for manufacturing companies and reiterated his intent to eliminate the state’s business equipment tax.

Gianforte suggested reining in health-care costs by increasing transparency in pricing. He also said he is interested in possibly pursuing tort reforms similar to those advanced in Texas.

He also cited the state of Georgia’s measures to reform the criminal justice system to reduce the population of non-violent drug and alcohol offenders burdening the state prison system.

Gianforte promised that he would get an infrastructure bill passed if elected. He criticized Bullock’s previous vetoes of infrastructure spending bills in 2012 and 2015 and said the incumbent governor failed to seriously pursue a viable compromise bill last session.

“He was not willing to work with the Legislature to get it done,” Gianforte said. “His proposal now is exactly the bill he vetoed a year ago.”