State Legislature 2022: Elijah Tidswell

My “why” for running is different than most others who stepped up this cycle, it’s my age. Being the youngest person running in the state right now, I believe that I can bring a different view on important issues that many of the current members of our legislature can’t. The laws being implemented will impact my generation the most and I want to make sure that young voices are being heard in Helena.

If I had to give an overall of what my policy goals are, it’s to make Montana a better place than anywhere else to live, work, and raise a family. The 3 things we could and should address in the next legislative session to achieve these goals are:

Improve Education– Giving our kids the best opportunity to succeed in the “real world” should be the number 1 goal. Our schools have gotten much better in the last few years but there are definitely still changes to be made, like requiring financial literacy classes.

Promote Public Safety– It’s no secret that here in Billings we have a crime issue. This scares away families moving here and hurts our small business culture. We need to have a close working partnership with local community leaders to find real solutions instead of passing bills that don’t actually address the root causes of crime.

Fight for Trafficking Victims– One of the biggest issues facing our Montana communities is the trafficking pandemic. This especially harms our indigenous communities. We have all heard the horror stories of hurting mother and father and we as a state have only just recently started to address this issue. I want to help continue the fight against trafficking by having a working partnership with both local governments and reservation leaders.

As I hinted at in my policy answers, I think that local control is definitely the best option for our communities in Montana. However, there are certain things that our local governments can’t get access to that our state government can. With all of that being said, the best way to return control to our local governments is to build more of a partnership between our state and our municipalities so that we have the people closest to the ground working in conjunction with the people who have access to the resources to help.

Talking to members of our City Council, the main thing that they believe we need most as a city is more jail space and that’s exactly what I want to work towards getting us. While adding more police officers was great, it doesn’t do much when we don’t have a place to actually put the criminals. We are in an endless loop of picking people up, filling out the paperwork, and dropping them back off on the street. This doesn’t do anything to prevent crime because the criminals know that they won’t actually be punished. This was highlighted in a report released last year that showed that 93 people cost the taxpayers of Billings $10,000,000. This is simply not sustainable.

The obvious answer to me is to start investing in nuclear energy. Not only is it by far the cleanest form of energy production but also the most effective and reliable. This would drive down the cost for the average Montanan and make sure that we never have the issue of rolling blackouts in our state. Another thing we could do to help our business environment in Montana is to eliminate the business equipment tax and make it less expensive for entrepreneurs to run their businesses.

The answer to any question about where money should go is balance. Currently not nearly enough is distributed back to our communities. If a higher percentage was returned back to the local areas that brought in the money they would be able to invest in new projects to make their cities even more attractive to tourists and bring in higher and higher revenues every year.

Montanas have made it clear that they don’t want or like sales tax. They have also shown to not really like taxes all around (who does). While having a healthy tax base is important to our communities it just hurts families to continue raising the rates they pay. We need to make sure our tax codes here in Montana bring more people into our state and that way we grow the tax base while keeping the rates low enough to still start a family here.

One of the biggest factors causing this housing shortage is restrictive zoning in many of our population centers. Places like Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula make it harder and harder for developers to build within the city limits instead forcing them to develop the county and leave the cities behind. The best thing the legislature can do is encourage the local governments to make the zoning less restrictive because, in the end, this is something managed by municipalities and not the state.