>> good morning everyone. look onto the bipartisan policy center. my name is dennis shea named executive director for the shea housing policy here in d.c.. this will be the eighth conversation in our housing leader speaker series which spotlights individuals who understand the foundational importance of housing and have made significant contributions to improving housing affordability. we are thrilled to have one such guest with us today and that's greg gianforte the 25th governor of the state of montana. governors gianforte represent a montana in the u.s. house of representatives after 34 years in the private-sector where he was a highly successful software

engineer. ensuring house affordability is a national challenge. it is especially difficult one in montana which has become one of the nations fastest growing states, perhaps a victim of its own success but an attractive place to live and work. with housing demand exceeding supply rents and home sale prices in the state have risen dramatically over the past several years. governor gianforte has made identifying and advancing bipartisan solutions and housing affordability challenge top priority. two years ago he created a housing task force with a broad mandate to make housing more affordable and attainable for montanans. recommendations of this task force the efforts of the montana legislature have already a series of new laws that streamline the housing development process and

dramatically reforms zoning and land use in the state. some have dubbed it the montana miracle. governor want to thank you for making housing a top priority and i want to thank you for joining us in the own want to welcome your wife the first lady susan gianforte who is here with us today. before starting our conversation that may remind their virtual audience if you have any questions for governor gianforte you can post them to our twitter account @bpc underscore bipartisan and use the #bpc live #bpc black and you're welcome to submit your questions to the youtube chat and we will save time at the end of the event to take questions or in person virtual audiences. governor thank you so much for being here. >> dennis thank you for having me put i know will spend a lot of time talking about housing.

let's go 30,000 feet. you've been governor for three plus years. how is the state doing and what are your priorities besides that? >> again thank you for having me. i ran for two reasons. want an has not been living up to its full potential. we export the best thief in the world, we export a lot of grain and we export our kids because we don't have enough jobs for them if business guy an electrical engineer by training in their first focus is to get the economy going. that's where our focus has been and it's both jobs so our kids can stay if they want to indent to protect our way of life. we are ray bluetooth pass a conservative budget were refunded all essential services in 2001 and 2022 and that brought us into, we have the

great blessing of our legislature only meets every two years so we didn't see them again until 2023. in that session we came and with significant surplus $2.5 billion surplus on a 5 billion-dollar budget so what we did is we gave a billion dollars back to montana in tax refunds and we fixed everything that was broken and we invested $300 million in behavior health and standard capacitor prison system. we increased our reserves and we still have money left over so we paid off all the state debt. we are completely debt free is a state now. i don't know when other state that is done that but that was applying a sick business principals and budgeting. our economy now we have had 24 consecutive month for unemployment has been at 3% or

less and we are the seventh fastest growing economy in the country. that's good and we are creating jobs. >> that's great. creating jobs and creating more demand for housing and i assume people are coming into the state. i've been reading about that so when you start focusing on the housing affordability challenge and how has housing costs changed us over to time since you've been governor until now. simply recently focused on housing was it's probably the number one issue facing working families. we want our nurses and their teachers and our police officers to live in communities where they serve. when housing prices get out of reach not only is the american dream more difficult to obtain but the people that are the fabric of our community can't be there. we will take questions at the end. >> excuse me this is not a time for questions.

[inaudible] >> thanks for coming. [inaudible] >> please sit down. this is not the time for questions. we will take questions toward the end of the event. thank you for coming. >> thanks for coming today. so where were we governor? >> we were talking about why affordable housing is so critical. [inaudible] >> could we --

[inaudible] [inaudible] [chanting] and fossil fuels greg. and fossil fuels. and fossil fuels.

[chanting] end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels. end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels. [chanting] end fossil fuels greg, end fossil wheels. end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels. end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels. [chanting] end fossil fuels greg, end fossil fuels. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[applause] >> there's never a moment here. so where were we? we were talking about housing. >> as i mentioned we want our teachers and police officers to live in the communities we serve and as prices increase its less attainable so this was as i said and it said it many times this is an important issue facing working montana families and we had to do something about it. >> you issued an executive order establishing a task force. tell us about that at and how works. >> this is a process that we have used a couple of times on big thorny issues because we knew there wasn't a single button we could push to lower

prices and we knew the problem was so big we couldn't buy her way out of it. there wasn't the money in the budget so we assembled a team a really diverse team of nonprofit leaders county commissioners city folks state officials people for private-sector builders, realtors and we brought them together and they brought them together in august and said we need results quickly. we are heading off into her legislative session so they assembled in august but i got my first report in october and my charge was really simple cast a broad net and give us a range of ideas and they did. i got the first report in the middle october the second report in the middle of december and we went to work in the legislative session and we ran the table. >> you have brought membership in a tight deadline and the

specific assignment is part of the secret sauce to make that effective. >> we build consensus around what could have been a very thorny issue in a critical way and given we came into the session without bipartisan support we were able to get this stuff done. so the task force had 36 recommendations and -- how is it received by the legislature initially? did you have the muscle the legislature >> our legislature can't be in muscle. we had to build consensus around these issues but we always brought it back do we wanted our teachers are police officers our nurses to that in the communities where they served and that was something everybody could support. that's been my experience and susan and i had a chance to serve in congress. we have people into our home on capitol hill every week and when

you break read with people and share time together new focus on the key principle you are trying to achieve you get consensus. >> some the things the task force recommended as i understand it were to allow multifamily residential and single family areas to allow adu's without minimums associated with it. these are some the things they recommend. >> it seems like it was a supply issue in using deregulation and increasing housing density. is that right or is it more focused on supply and how to build more homes? >> that was the problem in part because everybody discovered montana's more beautiful than any other state in the country and yellowstone and the pandemic

combined everybody was moving there and if they weren't moving there as a resident they bought a home as a second home and took that out of the inventory so was our population for the last 10 years has grown by 10%. the number of doorknobs has only grown by 7% plus we have homes kicked out of fama tory for second house so we had a supply problem. that was something we recognized early in the process so we focus on supply issues. you mentioned upward, there were seven and buckets of reforms. >> could you go through them? >> the first was we recognized that government regulations account for 40% of the cost. we had to reduce that. i had one builder that told me, he was building a multifamily apartment building maybe 15 units are so.

he had a year delay in permitting it added $700,000 in the cost of the building but the only option he had was to abbott into the price per the first thing we did so as we changed our land-use regime to streamline permitting so builders could get permits faster. we want to make sure the public has input into how communities grow but what this new law allows with local communities to adopt a growth plan that goes through all the public hearings and everybody gets input but when the builder walks in and says i want a permit that matches that growth plan and they get the permit. >> you don't have do go to public hearings. the overall growth plan goes to the public hearing process so that was reform number one. it also force, would have required local jurisdiction to

adopt a whole bunch of changes in their zoning rules. the second major problem we found as we looked at this was there's all kinds of infrastructure programs low-interest loans were made his apologies. they are all focused on urban renewal. it will pay for replacement water and sewer. we did have an infrastructure for new water and sewer in new subversions and that was our problem. so we had a surplus fortunately. we put over $100 million in what we called the home loan program which provides low-interest loans to communities to do water and sewer for new subdivisions and that we required to have at least 10 units per acre. so there was workforce housing because before we did that a builder with half to put the water and sewer infrastructure and adding to the price of homes

which made homes less affordable to display the ongoing tax obligation of the home pays back the bond over time. the third area as you mentioned we allowed adu's has a right to any single family home anywhere in the state. it could be a tiny home the backyard and apartment over the garage but but this increases in phil and provides first-time homes for the people who want it in our community. we also change the zoning at the state level to allow for apartments in all commercial areas. you have retail on the first floor and apartments on the second floor and not all zoning allows that. we ended exclusionary zoning. in many communities they require big houses and big lots. they are more expensive so we allowed smaller houses on smaller lots and anywhere in the state were single-family homes allowed we allow a duplex so

that was done statewide. we also change the way we do local design review. most of the local design reviews in our state in many places serve volunteer and they come to that with their own particular agenda. maybe they like cedar siding or a certain species of tree. we abolished all the volunteer zoning review boards in the state and require professional officials at the local level review that and the requirements on builders are restricted to safety issues. so they can require for example a sidewalk because you don't want people walking in the street but they can't tell you you how to plant trees. things like that and then finally because we recognize we have a supply problem if we wanted more homes we needed more

carpenters plumbers and electricians so we changed our printers ship and in the process quadrupled the number of apprenticeship slots so to put that into perspective since we made the change we now allow the journeyman to supervise two apprentices whereas before we required to journeyman for every practice so we quadrupled it. we added more apprentices and 2022 then 18, 19 and 20 combined so we have over 3000 people now in the building trades and the last thing in the category of trade we added a state tax credit where we will pay any business up to $3000 scholarship money and up to 50% of the cost to send employees to trade school.

>> i can understand why this has been dubbed the montana miracle. blue states would be envious of it. >> i did have a blue governor. >> how did you get that done? >> by bringing people together and what is most gratifying as we are seeing results now. there was a survey that came out two months ago in missoula one of our largest communities were in the last year the increase in supply the agency rates have dropped from just over 1% which is way too tight a market to just over 6% in the market and the average rental rate has come down by 20% in the last year. getting anecdotal evidence in bozeman where tapping so the free market has responded to these changes and reduction in red tape increased workers and

rental rates are coming down and rates are coming down to a rate that's more reasonable. and then the course there's a challenge to a number of these provisions. could you talk about that and what's going on in terms of the status? >> we think those are particularly bad decisions so we are appealing them. we built consensus and we think we will prevail. >> now the task force did its job with a five-month deadline. usually when you have a task force -- >> i put in an engineering charge. >> there you go. but it still around. it's still kicking. it's being reauthorized as i understand it until 2025. >> the charge to the current

task force is twofold. one is we made all those changes. we want to know if they are working so they are studying the outcomes of policy changes that we adopted number one and anybody who has worked with me very long one though i always say better is always possible so as the study the changes that were made in the impact they are having the question becomes how can we do better? will go through another phase of policies with their legislature and they'll be back in 2025. >> for 90 days. >> for 90 days. >> is that a hard and fast rule? >> yes. >> i was going to ask you nationally and you aren't answered my question. nationally there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that there's a dearth of residential construction that hasn't

recovered from the great recession. is that still a challenge? you seem to have a program to deal with that. >> i mentioned them montana education technical credit which helps with paying scholarships but the other thing we have done is come i don't think as a nation we done a particularly good job on exposing k-12 students to alternative career paths particularly in the construction trades. >> and manufacturing. spend if you ask a kid what they want to do in a corrupt they say a policeman fireman which is great but that's who they see working. a program we adopted something called the workplace learning experience so now in the montana high school student can spend two to 20 hours a week on the job site and get high school

graduation credit for it and we are partnering between the local chambers of congress like in kalispell montana the local chamber recruits their members for internships for high school students and then there's a full-time person in high school and to place those students with those companies in the private-sector and it's the whole gambit. it's not just construction. there are high school students spending time in law offices architectural offices manufacturing heavy equipment operators across-the-board k. and it's opening up new horizons. the students may still decide they want to go for your degree program but they made conducting an apprentice. we have been kalispell has taken a program where they hire an individual to do workplace learning experiences for k-8. you might ask the question is how to expose a second-grader to the construction trades?

they go out to job site and they see people putting up homes. they go into manufacturing plant in instead they may still want to be a fireman or a policeman but they may say or want to operate that machining cut the metal. it exposes them to career options. >> their brain and it blossoms maybe five or six years down the road. before entering politics he started a very successful software company. do you see new possibilities for new technologies? there's a lot going on in the construction space. new technologies, aireducing the cost of building new housing. in places like montana and rural states there's no scale for affordability. construction.

ruit a manufacturing business to montana. they will hire a foreign 50 until manufacture homes for the whole rocky mt. region. we are we are the first in the country to incorporate into her building code staor 3-d homes and i don't know that anyone is doing that yet. they are building them in montana that we are the first day to actually do that and we are starting to experiment with ai. remember 40% of the cost of construction is government regulation but one particular problem we have and i d't other places is they get edited over decades and it's sort of like remodeling an old home where you've had this experience to you go in and their shag carpet in the room and somebody

put linoleum over it and then they put hard work floor on top of that. it's bad. a massive relief effort and we went through every line of every code in every i signed into law almost 200 laws in this last legislative session but they are still t one of the things we are experimenting with now is putting our state regulations whether it's building codes for environmental quality regulations into nai model and telling it to go to the high school graduation level and we will edit it. what we would like the rags that we have to have to protect the environment to be understandable by a main street business people. they put it in linguistic model and i don't think were different than anybody else. it require a doctrinal understanding.

>> ai can help make zoning laws that exist throughout the country. you are out of montana that you two terms in congress. i'm a little hesitant to ask you this question but where does the federal government didn't? book could congress do to make it easier for your administration to ensure we have access to reasonably affordable housing in what can washington to? >> stop spending so much money. money supplies was driving inflation in its inflation that's drives up the price of homes. that would be number one number two just stay out of our way. >> do we have any questions? >> yes sir.

do you want immigrants who have the ability and desire to construct homes imposed tariffs on construction? >> i think we should encourage legal immigration and for the country. my primary concern is illegal immigration has been occurring at the scene about 10 million people come in illegally to the country and that places the burden on all of our kids. [inaudible] >> i'm from the milton friedman school. [inaudible] >> thank you. we initiated a new program and thank you.

i'll put out the invitation to folks. at the department of commerce that created a program called a red carpet program and as we have adopted policies and we have lowered taxes what we offer companies interested in moving to montana as a sanctuary for freedom and free enterprise. and work ethic that won't quit in the quality of life that inspires tremendous work. we have had great success and i've mentioned a manufactured home business. that is significant and they will be a large employer with a fully higher out. the german manufacturing lewistown there will be 500 employees there and a 90 million-dollar investment from brooks delta glendive. we have 150 businesses.

i hope this doesn't get me in trouble. [inaudible] you want to move back to america? we have a question from our virtual audience. this is a pricey home prices in montana has seen some of the sharpest increases in homelessness in the country. what's driving this trend and how is the state addressing the problem? >> yeah we saw in our hometown of those men. we have people living in rvs on the streets right down the street from our home and it's tragic. that's why increasing the supply of homes are so important to make it obtainable and that's why we took the actions that we did. we have also seen these illegal immigrants that have relocated to every community in the united states and we are seeing that as well. they have an obligation to take care of them when they arrive

but it would be better off if we seal the border. >> so, you mention on homelessness he mentioned the supply and a lack of supply being part of the problem and earlier in the conversation you mentioned spending for mental health systems. how do you see the problem? is as is it mostly supply issue or combination of factors? >> yet to recognize the two sides of the coin are mental health and addiction. we have seen a 70% increase in fentanyl last year and it's all coming across the southern border. i talk to law enforcement 80 to 90% of the detention centers have behavior of issues so we asked the legislature that gave us $300 million which is a massive investment and we are using those funds in a couple of ways.

one is we are going to the point of need. we want to help people get healthy. one of those places we are bringing behavior help into the state prisons so that people can get help there and be productive members of society. we are also prior demonstrations have shut down mental health that we are bringing the services back with local crisis centers and things of that sort. we also have a bipartisan commission because i don't have appropriations authority only the legislature has approved rations authority. they only meet for toys ear. the legislature working together with eric administration created a behavioral health commission and the legislature delegated appropriations authority to them for this branded million dollars. as they are hearing about the needs in the community they have the ability to spend money

between legislative sessions and i think i've proved by for six programs under that commission so far with behavioral health and county detention centers and local crisis response teams and that sort of stuff. >> could you stand please? [inaudible] [inaudible] >> every time you add an incentive on the scale it

produces results some desirable in some undesirable. i'll give you an example. during the pandemic we had left people out of work and the economy slowed down and the federal government allowed the states to add supplemental unemployment benefits and the unintended consequence it might have been necessary during the height of the pandemic but i came into office that october so we were the first in the country to eliminate supplemental unemployment benefits. 26 other states followed us and what that did was it shifted the emphasis back to going to work so people could have the satisfaction of holding a job and we also are prior demonstrations had shut down many small businesses as cross the state and implemented mask mandates. i think montanans can make those decisions themselves.

there's nothing wrong with wearing a mask but it should be an individual decision and not a government mandate. that was a key piece to getting our economy going here. >> i have another question here from our virtual audience and we'll get to you. that's the biggest take away in the montana miracle and you see it catching on, that other state should implement to help with her old housing supply challenges? >> i would say this task force is the unique thing that we did. i can stand up and tell you my opinion but when you bring a broad section of bipartisan folks together around the table with a very clear charge to produce results it happens and if you search on the internet montana governor housing task force the minutes from all the meetings are there. the agendas, it's all there and

it's a model. >> we have done some work childcare and i'm interested in what your plans are. just your thoughts on that. >> we have made significant investments they are in the childcare workforce is the workforce behind the workforce. if you don't have that you can't join the other businesses. they put over $100 million into grants to childcare providers. that was the first thing in the second thing we did was we had elaborate licensing requirements that made it difficult for childcare to operate. we modified those.

we expanded licensure to allow for in home care. it makes a lot of sense in a lot of a rural committees were you are going to have a big center someplace but a mom or dad who decides to stay home with their kids might take three or four other kids into the home. that can be a real help for other working families and the community. we changed the licensing rules to allow that to happen. >> we will get to you in a second. one question from our audience if had the run-in to the opposition from republicans and legislatures run by republicans or local communities and if so how did you go about trying to persuade them? >> so yes.

human beings don't like change. any change at all, right or left. so i would say the key thing in what we did was really to always focus on what we want they'll come to be. no one would disagree that we want our teachers, our nurses and our police officers to live in the communities where they serve and they always try to bring the conversation back to that. i find the same thing is true when we talk about education. our goal and education policies ought to be to help every child reach their full potential regardless of their background or circumstances or abilities. when you use a noble lens and you look at a really complicated issue that simplifies the decision. >> was there a concern about sprawl and montana?

you had to build out further and further away to have a sense of sprawl. >> this is really interesting because this challenge brought together people on the same side of the table to work together. as we look at zoning changes and got rid of exclusionary zoning the builders love to that because it meant they could return inventory faster. when did we have the builders in the conservation people on the same side of the table? bowie at the same goal which was to allow our teachers and nurses and police officers to live where they work. >> can you please stand? considering the rising cost of living and further cost of

living? >> that people who work in the building trade. >> they are making a good living but i was with an electrician in montana last month and they are hiring high school graduates to get 20 or $25 an hour. they can go to school at night remotely. every time they pass a set of courses they get a raise and when they get there whole journeyman certificate after four years of school they have no debt and a billings montana they started a program and that's the starting salary in billings montana. you can spend for six years getting a bachelor's degree. these are great careers. the work of building shelter for

human beings is inherently good and worthwhile. we are just telling that story to high school students as they think about a career choice. >> we have a good question from our virtual audience. montana has a high percentage of elderly households compared to other states. how was your administration working to ensure there is sufficient excessive -- accessible housing for elderly montanans. >> a lot of these elderly montanans don't want to leave. as property taxes continue to pick up difficult for people on a fixed income. this is why allowing them to add an adu allowing them to put an apartment over their garage to add a second income allows them to stay or maybe their kids lived crosstown and they put an

apartment in for grandma. it works both ways. higher density more of portability helps the nurses and the teachers but it also helps the elderly as well. >> housing affordability helps everyone. >> is that something or heard you mention? >> a couple of things. we dramatically expanded our property tax relief for lower income montanans. often that's the elderly. we also kicked off property tax relief task force in the last session. we gave almost $4000 back to montana families and tax rebates. that was a one-time surplus but we need to do more to get property taxes down. could you please stand? thank you.

>> i never thought about using ai that way. >> i think ai has a lot of promise. i mentioned one rewriting the regulations of the lower education level. the other way we are doing it, we are doing an experiment. it's an experiment. we have a lot of social welfare programs food stamps tanev rental assistance, job training and there are literally dozens of these programs. it's very difficult for people so we have a number job service offices around the state. they tend to cater to people who

have a lot of difficulty finding employment. they can't find childcare and the counselors in those offices can use a particular program. whatever their program is and they recognize it. we are doing an ai experiment that will worship lies dozens of programs and we are calling it the prosperity portal which will look at all the various social welfare and job training programs and build the path to prosperity for that individual based on their particular situation instead of some counselor or job service office who has a hammer in the world looks like a nail. i don't know where that's going to go but i hope i can report back on progress there. >> i think i'm going to close this line of questions.

governor you didn't have the engage in public service. you put yourself in the arena twice when he ran for congress and governor. what drives you and what words of wisdom would you impart to other younger people who might want to pursue a career in public service and politics? >> my wife and i have been incredibly blessed. the last business we started in our home we took $5000 it grew to 1100 employees in 17 offices around the world publicly traded matt for eight years. it was great. and then i recognized how policies were in keeping myself and others from attaining similar situation so for me i

think our founding fathers have always envisioned people in public service would have put a career in as a lawyer or a farmer or a business person and go into public service later so for me i really believe to much who is given much is expected. this is an act of service for us. we saw our four kids don't live in montana anymore. if i'm out with a group like this and i ask montanans how many of you have kids or grandkids did don't live here anymore almost every hand goes up. it kind of woke us up to this full potential so being able to take that business experience and bring it to public service to create better outcomes for montanans is truly the honor of my life and i love the work. that's really what motivates me. >> thank you for your public

service and thank you for what you're doing with housing and thank you for joining us today. we had a little blip in the proceedings but i want to expand and encourage everyone to give a round of applause to governor gianforte. [applause] into the first lady.