Discussion on housing policy with solutions when the Bipartisan Policy Center featuring the montana governor. You are watching live coverage here on cspan. Good morning everyone and welcome to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Im the executive director for housing policy here. This will be the eighth conversation in our housing leaders Speaker Series which aims to spotlight 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 is the 25th governor of the great state of montana. Prior to assuming the rains, the governor represented montana in the u. S. House of representatives after 34 years in the private sector where he was a highly Successful Software engineer and businessman. Assuring Housing Affordability is a National Challenge but it is especially difficult one in montana which has become one of the nations Fastest Growing states. Perhaps a victim of its own success is a very attractive place to live and work. With Housing Demand exceeding supply, rents and home sale prices in the state have driven risen dramatically over the past several years. The governor has made identifying and advancing Bipartisan Solutions to Housing Affordability, the challenge a top priority. Two years ago he created a Housing Task Force with a broad mandate to make housing more affordable and attainable for montanans. The recommendations of the task force and the efforts of the Montana Legislature have produced a series of new laws that streamline the Housing Development process and dramatically reform zoning and land use in the state. Some have dubbed it to montana miracle. Governor i want to thank you for making housing a top priority and i want to thank you for joining us and welcome your wife who was with us here today. Before starting our conversation let me remind our virtual audience that if you have questions for the governor you can post them to our twitter account throughout the event using the bpc live. Youre also welcome to submit your questions and the youtube chat and we will save time at the end of the event to take questions from our in person and virtual audiences. Governor, thank you for being with us. Host thank you for having gov. Gianforte thank you for having me. Dennis lets go further 30,000 feet. Even governor for three plus years. How is the state doing and what are your priorities besides housing. Gov. Gianforte i ran for two reasons. Montana had not been living up to its full potential, we export the best beef in the world, we export a lot of grain and we export our kids because we didnt have jobs. Im a business guy and our first focus was really petting the economy going. Thats where our focus has been. Its been both jobs so kids can stay if they want to, and protect our way of life. We were able to pass a really conservative budget where we funded essential services in 2001 in 2022. That brought us into we have the great blessing of our legislature only meets for 90 days every two years so we did not see them until 2020 in that session we came in with a significant surplus. On about a 5 billion budget. What we did was we gave 1 billion back to the people of montana in tax refunds and lower rates. We invested 300 million in Behavioral Health, we rebuilt our expanding capacity in our prison system, we increased our reserves. We still have money left over so we paid off state debt. I dont know of another state thats done that. But that was applying basic business principles to budgeting. So our economy now we have had 24 consecutive months where unemployment has been 3 or less. It is good we are creating the jobs. Dennis creating jobs, you are creating more demand for housing , people are coming into the state, been reading about that. Why did you start focusing on the Housing Affordability challenge and how have housing costs changed since the time youve been governor to today . The reason we focused on housing was it is probably the number one issue facing working families because we want our nurses and our teachers and our Police Officers to live in the communities where they serve and when housing prices get out of reach not only is the dream more difficult to obtain but the people who are the fabric of the community can be there. Dennis we are going to take questions at the end. Will you give your children a right to a livable will you give david, richard, rachel a right please sit down this is not the time for questions. We will take them toward the end of the event. But thank you for coming. Gov. Gianforte thanks for coming today. Dennis where were we governor. Gov. Gianforte we were talking about why Affordable Housing is so critical. We do not have enough time to worry about the economy, we need to generations now and save this planet. It is our right to a livable future. We deserve to live the rest of our lives in safety and security. We will not stand here and listen to the governor talk about things when pressing concerns are coming in on all sides. Children deserve a livable future. All the children of america and the world deserve a livable future. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End, fossil fuels greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. End fossil fuels, greg. End fossil fuels. To soak up more cash for his reelection bid during a threeday sweep of the state for trip the Campaign Announced theyd collected 42 million contributions during january for 422,000 donors. Mr. Biden ended with 130 billion cash on hand. Officials say its the highest total amassed by any democratic candidate at this point in the cycle. His Campaign Manager called in a disputable show of strength. Mr. Biden will travel to california, it was from his return that the white house that he had brief conversations with reporters about the future of discussions with the House Speaker mike johnson over funding for ukraine. The headline out of that is biden would meet with johnson if he has anything to say. The president talking with reporters per years a bit of that conversation. Id be happy to if he had anything to say. [applause] never a dull moment here. We were talking about housing. Why did you make housing such a priority . Gov. Gianforte as i mentioned we want teachers and Police Officers to live in the communities where they serve. As prices increased it was less attainable so this was ive said many times this is the number one issue facing working montana families and we have to do something about it. You issued an executive order establishing the task force. Tell us how that works. Gov. Gianforte this is a process weve used a couple of times now on big thorny issues because we knew there was not a Single Button to push to lower prices and the problem was so big we could not buy our way out of it. We assembled a really diverse team of nonprofit leaders, county commissioners, city folks, state officials. People from the private sector. Builders, realtors and we brought them together and i brought them together in august and said we need results quickly we are heading into our legislative session so they assembled in august. I got my first report in october. Lancaster really broad net and give us a range of ideas and they did. I got the first report in the middle of october. The second report in the middle of december. We went to work in the legislative session and ran the table. Dennis do you think the fact you had broad membership and the fact you a tight deadline with a very specific assignment for the task force as part of the secret sauce to make that effective . Gov. Gianforte it allowed us to build consensus around what couldve been a very thorny issue in a quick way. Given that we came into the session without bipartisan support we were able to get that done. Dennis the task force at 36 recommendations. Did you have to muscle the legislature to say gov. Gianforte our legislature is independent thinkers. We had to build consensus around these issues. We always brought it back to we wanted our teachers, our Police Officers, our nurses to live in the communities where they served and that something everyone could support. Thats in my experience when susan and i had a chance to serve in congress we would ask people to dinner at our home on capitol hill every week and we would just when you break bread with people and share time together and you focus on the key principle youre trying to achieve its a lot easier to build consensus. Some of the things the task force recommended was to allow multifamily residential and singlefamily zoned areas to allow add use without parking minimums associated with it. These are some of the things they recommended. It seems like it was a supply issue and using deregulation as a means of decreasing housing density. Is that right or was it more focused on supply and how to build more homes . Gov. Gianforte that was the problem. In part because everybody discovered montana is more beautiful than any other state in the country. The show yellowstone in the pandemic combined that everybody was moving. If they werent moving there is a permanent residence they bought a home a second home and took that out of the inventory. So it was our population over the last 10 years growing by 10 , the number of new doorknobs has only grown by 7 . Plus we added homes taken out of inventory for second homes so we had a supply problem and that was something we recognized early in the process so we focused on supply issues. I would say there were seven buckets of forms. The first was we recognized that government regulation accounts for about 40 of the cost of a home. We had to reduce that. Id one builder who told me he was building a multifamily Apartment Building maybe 15 units or so. He had a year delay in permitting that added 700,000 to the cost. The only option was to add that into the price. So the first thing we did was we changed our Land Use Planning regime so builders could get permits faster. We want to make sure the public has input into how communities grow but what this new law is it allows them to adopt a growth plan going through all the public hearings. But then when a builder walks in and says i want a permit if it matches the growth plan they just hand him the permit. You dont have to go through public hearings. The overall growth plan has gone through the process. Thats reform number one. It also forced we require jurisdiction local jurisdiction to adopt a whole bunch of changes in their zoning rules. The second major problem we found is theres all kinds of infrastructure programs lowinterest loans for municipalities, but they are all focused on urban renewal, they will pay for replacement of water and sewer. We did not have any infrastructure funds for new water and sewer in new subdivisions. We had a surplus fortunately, we put over 100 million in the Homes Loan Program which provides lowinterest loans to communities to do water and sewer for new subdivisions but we required they have at least so it was more Workforce Housing and because we before we did that a builder would have to put the water and sewer infrastructure in which made the homes less affordable. This way the ongoing Tax Obligation of the home paid back the bond over time so thats a change. The third area we allowed add use as a right to a Single Family in the state. It could be an apartment over the garage. But this increases infill and provides firsttime homes for these people we want to have in our communities. We also change the zoning at a state level to allow apartments in all commercial areas so we had floor apartments, not all zoning allowed that. We ended exclusionary zoning which in many communities it requires big houses on big lots. They are more expensive when you do that so we allowed smaller houses on smaller lots. Anywhere in the state were a Single Family home is allowed we allow a duplex. That was done statewide. We change the way we do local design review. Most of the local design reviews in our state are volunteer boards and they all come to that with their own particular agenda. Maybe they like cedar siding, maybe someone likes a certain species of tree. So we abolished the volunteer zoning review boards in the state and require that professional officials at the local level review that and their requirements on builders are restricted to safety issues. So they can require a sidewalk because you dont want people walking in the street but they cant tell you you have to plant trees. So its things like that. Because we recognize we have a supply problem if you wanted more homes we need more carpenters and plumbers and electricians so we changed our apprenticeship ratios and in the process quadruple the number of apprenticeship slots. Since we made the change we now allow journeyman to supervise to apprentices whereas before we required two journeyman for every apprentice. We now have added more apprentices in 2022 then 18, 19 and 20 combined. We have over 3000 people on the Building Trades apprentices. The last thing in that category of trades education, we added a state tax credit where we will pay any business up to 3000 scholarship money up to 50 of the cost of tuition to send employees to trade school. Dennis i can understand why this has been dubbed the montana miracle. These are actions that blue states would be envious of. I know montana is a pretty red state. Gov. Gianforte i had a blue governor say how did you get that done. Dennis how did you get it done . Gov. Gianforte whats most gratifying is we are seeing results now. Results two months ago in one of our largest communities where in the last year because of the increase in supply the vacancy rates for apartments has dropped from just over 1 is way too tight of a market to just over 6 in that market and the average rental rate has come down by 20 in the last year. We are getting anecdotal evidence some more things are happening so the free market has responded to these changes in reduction in red tape and increase of workers and rental rates are calming down and vacancy rates for apartments are going up to something more reasonable. Dennis there have been at least one challenge to a number of these provisions through the court system in montana. Would you talk about that and whats going on with the status. Dennis we gov. Gianforte we think those are particularly bad decision so we are appealing them. We think we will prevail. The task force did its job. In the five months deadline. Usually when you have a task force or commission gov. Gianforte i put an engineer in charge. Dennis it is still around and still kicking. You reauthorized it as i understand it till 2025. What else is on it . Gov. Gianforte the charge to the current task force is twofold. We made all of these changes. We want to know if they are working. They are studying the outcomes of policy changes being adopted. Anybody whos worked with us long will know i think better is always possible. So as we study changes we made and the impact they are having the question becomes how can we do better. We are able to look at another phase of policies. Our legislature will be back in 2025 for 90 days. Is that a hard and fast rule . Gov. Gianforte yes. [laughter] dennis i was going to ask you nationally you sort of answered my question but nationally there has been anecdotal evidence that there is a dearth of skilled workers, never fully recovered from the Great Recession and a lot of those folks left the business because housing was being built. Is that still a challenge . You java program. You have a lot of programs. The education technical which helps with paying the scholarship. The other thing weve done is i dont think the nation has done a good job of exposing k12 students to alternative career paths particularly in construction trades and manufacturing. U. S. Little kids what they want to be when they grow up, they say policeman, fireman but thats who they see working. One of the reforms we have adopted is something called the workplace learning experience. So any montana i School Student can spend two to 20 hours a week on a jobsite and get a High School Graduation credit for it. We are partnering between the local chambers of commerce in montana the local chamber recruits their members for internships fry School Students. And then theres a fulltime person at the high school and they placed those students with those companies in the private sector. Its a full gambit. They are spending time in law offices, architectural offices, manufacturing, heavy Equipment Operators across the board. Students may still decide they want to go to a fouryear Degree Program but they may end up becoming an apprentice. Theyve taken this step hiring an individual to do workplace learning experiences for k8. You might ask the question how do you expose a seventh grader to a construction trade. They do field trips. They go out to a jobsite. They see people putting up homes. Instead they may still want to be fireman or a policeman but they also might say i want to operate that machine that cuts metal. You put that little seed in their brain and it sort of blossoms. Before entering politics you started a very Successful Software company. Do you see any possibilities for new technologies. Theres a lot going on in the construction space but new technologies, ai