Gianforte can’t be bothered to fix a mess he created on the Flathead Reservation

Lake County Sheriff Don Bell speaks before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023. (Photo by Nicole Girten/Daily Montanan)

There’s nothing more insincere than an arsonist saying to a fire department: You gonna put some water on that?

But that’s kind of the situation Montanans are faced with when considering what will happen in less than two months’ time in Lake County and the Flathead Reservation.

In slowly unfolding disaster that has had plenty of time to be solved, Lake County has said repeatedly that it cannot afford to pick up the law enforcement tab on the bulk of the reservation without a little help from the state. The Lake County Commissioners have rightly argued there’s too few people paying for too few officers on too much land.

Their demands have been simple and straightforward: Either help out with the cost or take over law enforcement.

Give credit to Rep. Joe Read, R-Ronan, and Sen. Greg Hertz, R-Polson, who both tried to broker a deal that will keep law enforcement in this particular corner of Indian Country at a level that serves the public and helps the county. Ronan and Hertz led the effort for the state to kick in at least $5 million during the next biennium to fund law enforcement so that Lake County could continue to staff law enforcement.

However, Gov. Greg Gianforte, also a Republican, had different plans when he took his veto pen to legislation that allocated money and seemed to solve the problem. Instead, the governor cut $4,999,999 and left Lake County with an insulting 100 pennies to provide law enforcement on the Flathead Reservation.

That leaves the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes and $1 to figure it out a solution.

And now, as the moments tick away and law enforcement in the future remains uncertain, Gianforte is encouraging federal and tribal officials to “work with Lake County to identify a solution prior to his declaration.”

Isn’t that wonderful that our governor is encouraging everyone else besides his own office to do what he refused?

Gianforte will be forced by law, which has been in place for almost as long as the governor has been alive, to declare the law enforcement agreement dissolved, and then Flathead Reservation will enter a period in which the state, county and federal governments will have all abandoned people who pay taxes, are citizens, and have a reasonable and historic expectation of law enforcement.

As many messes as Republicans in the Legislature have created, this is one where they actually stepped up, understood the problems, listened to the counties, and spent money only to have it die by the veto pen of the governor.

It’s hard to imagine this sort of thing happening in almost any other place in Montana, but because it’s an issue relegated to Indian Country, it somehow is everyone else’s problem. If Miles City or Dillon lost law enforcement, I have to think there’d be a radically different response. So why is it different now?

The person most responsible for this mess has been the person least likely to help. Gianforte has couched his criticism of Lake County law enforcement as a concern about how state funds would be spent: In other words, he wasn’t certain that it would be used to help the people on the reservation.

That’s not just a slap in the face to the people who depend on law enforcement on the Flathead Reservation, who deserve protection, it’s also an insult to the law enforcement which has provided service there for decades; at one point Gianforte even said it was a “model.”

Now, he can’t trust them?

The state has a $2 billion surplus which was funded mostly on the backs of residents paying property taxes. The very least some of that money could do is help provide the most basic law enforcement service that any Treasure State resident would come to expect — and Gianforte would still have $1,995,000,000 left over to admire, collect, or crow about (whatever one does with billions).

Sadly, it may just take an act of Congress — a budget allocation for more FBI and BIA officers — to solve this problem that could have been solved by the Gianforte administration just being reasonable.

Keep in mind: The governor’s solution was as impractical as it was insulting. $1 for law enforcement on the reservation — take it or leave it.

Lake County did the only thing it could by walking.

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