Hess describes the day of a legislator

State Rep. Stephanie Hess, R-Havre, talked Friday during a meeting of the Pachyderm Club in Havre about life in the Montana House of Representatives and criticized the governor for vetoing scores of legislation.

A first-term member of the Montana State House of Representatives, Hess, 44, is running for a second term to the House District 28 seat. The district encompasses all of Havre south of the Milk River and extends slightly east and west outside of city limits.

Hess faces a challenge from Hill County Democratic Party Vice-Chair Jacob Bachmeier in November.

The first part of the talk was called "A Day in the Life of a State Legislator."

Montana's Legislature is a citizen legislature that is in session for 90 days every other year. The House consists of 100 members. Hess said that during a legislative session members work Monday through Saturday.

A typical day starts with members arriving at the capitol in Helena at 7 a.m, Hess said.

For the first hour, members meet with their respective party leaders or lawmakers who have drafted legislation.

Each day at 8 a.m. meetings of Class A committees take place.

The House has 16 committees, and each lawmaker typically sits on three of them, Hess said.

Hess said Class A committees meet six days a week and handle most of the bills, which, if approved in committee, later come to the floor for a vote by the entire House.

Hess' Class A Committee in the last session was the House Judiciary Committee, which would meet until noon. Last session, the Judiciary Committee took up more legislation than any other committee, Hess said.

As a result, Hess said, the committee occasionally went beyond its scheduled time.

She would leave the committee meeting at about noon and go to the House floor.

Unlike the state Senate, where lawmakers have desks and offices, members of the House do not have desks or offices of their own.

"So my 'desk' and my 'office' is on the floor of the House of Representatives," Hess said.

When she gets to the House floor, Hess is typically greeted by a stack of emails, messages and mail, she said.

Hess said she would read and respond to messages from Havre residents first. She then would answer the rest of her mail and reviews bills the House is prepared to bring to the floor.

At 1 p.m., all House members assemble on the floor to discuss and hear bills. Hess said that between 1 and 3 p.m. is when bills are debated. Members then attend committee meetings. Hess said which non-Class A committee meetings a lawmaker attends depends on the day of the week.

In the 2015 legislative session, Hess sat on the Human Services and Fish, Wildlife and Parks committees.

"The subjects that get handled in those committees are emotional," Hess said. "I was actually a little bit surprised at about how emotional people got in FWP."

During the committee hearings, people who support, oppose or are affected by legislation or are experts on a subject testify.

Committee meetings in the late afternoon usually last from 3 to 5 p.m, but Hess said the Human Service Committee often went over schedule. She said the chair on that committee believed people who come to appear before the committee should be heard.

When that committee adjurned, members would have dinner.

After dinner, she reviewed bills and consulted with non-legislators who are experts in a given field, so she would be prepared for the next morning, Hess said.

She said the Legislature is a bit of "a pressure cooker."

This session, the Legislature passed 690 bills and likely double that number was proposed, Sen. Kris Hansen, R-Havre, who was in the audience at the meeting said.

The Budget

"So, this is House Bill 2," Hess said, referring to a binder that contained the state budget passed during the last legislative session.

She then dropped a small stack of papers on top of the binder.

"And this is House Bill 2 with amendments," Hess said

A piece of legislation is usually about three pages long. But the budget is much longer.

Hess said she brought the budget with her because House Bill 2 is often cited in mailers and attack ads as a source for claims that a lawmaker supported or opposed a bill.

She said saying that a lawmaker voted against something because it was in House Bill 2 is "pretty thin ice" because the budget includes funding for a wide range of programs.

"We don't vote on this once, we vote on this many times," Hess said.

She said that when the budget is brought up on the floor, lawmakers spend several days going through it.

Hess said there are two things that Montana's Legislature is forced to do that she would like to see at the federal level.

One of those is a requirement that any budget passed by the Legislature is balanced.

The Montana Legislature also requires that the language in a bill is related to the title of a bill.

"Unlike Washington, D.C., where they can have underwater basket weaving and they can slip in whatever, Planned Parenthood funding," Hess said.

Vetoes

The Republicans hold a 59-41 majority in the House and a 29-21 majority in the Senate, but many items passed by the Legislature were vetoed by Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock.

Hess said that she is guided by the principle that "government should serve us and not itself."

Hess said more than 70 proposed laws were vetoed in the 2015 legislative session.

Those include income and property tax cuts, tax simplification, proposals to cut welfare fraud and audit the Montana Department of Health and Human Services and establish educational savings accounts for students with disabilities.

She said those vetoes are examples of government serving itself.

Another piece of legislation Hess supported and Bullock vetoed would have revised the replacement schedule for license plates.

Under the revised guidelines, vehicle owners would have to replace their license plates every 10 years instead of every five.

Hess said the governor vetoed the bill because it would have cost the state $3 million in revenue over four years.

Hess said that the amount that would be lost over four years was small compared to the larger budget.

The next legislative session will likely be one for which finances will be tight, she said.

Members of the state legislative Fiscal Division, which provides the state Legislature with its budget numbers, said the ending fund balance for FY2017 will be $109 million rather then the $314 million initially projected.

"And it's looking very likely that we will have to tighten our belt a smidge this coming session," Hess said.

That is in contrast to past legislative sessions when there has been extra money.

Hess also slammed Bullock's new infrastructure proposal that would include taking a portion of the state coal trust to fund future infrastructure improvements.

She said the plan resembles one that the governor had vetoed in a past legislative session.

In the last legislative session a bipartisan bill to fund infrastructure projects through a mix of bonding and money from the surplus failed by one vote to get the supermajority needed to approve state borrowing.

Hess voted for the bill, but criticized it for including capital projects, she said.

"If the governor really wanted that to pass it would have passed," Hess said.

The projects included the restoration of Romney Hall, a building at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Hess said capital projects should not be in a bill that should be focused on repairing bridges, streets and water systems.