Kendall Cotton: Montana’s Crossroads

I loved the theme of the event: Montana at a crossroads. The festival website proclaims, “It is time to come together as leaders to seize the moment and build our future together.” I couldn’t agree more.

I was invited to speak to the festival about Montana’s bipartisan housing “miracle” and how it can be a model for Montanans to rise to meet even more of our biggest challenges.

To refresh your memory, in 2023, Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature nearly unanimously passed a free market wish-list of pro-housing reforms to legalize building affordable starter homes in Montana cities and streamline local regulations to speed up construction, which will help to drive housing costs down for everyone.

An incredible bipartisan coalition of groups representing Montanans from all walks of life formed to champion pro-housing reforms during the legislature, all united behind the idea of giving landowners in cities more freedom to build affordable homes on their property.

While other states have spent decades attempting to pass these similar zoning reforms, Montana miraculously did it in a year with wide bipartisan support. National media outlets have dubbed it the “Montana Miracle.”

Below is an excerpt from my speech from the Montana Festival:

“I don’t think the ‘Montana Miracle’ is a one-time fluke. I think it can represent a new paradigm of politics in Montana, where the left and right join together in common belief that Montanans must be free to build, innovate, and progress in order to overcome the biggest challenges facing our state.

Montana’s greatest challenges, in my opinion, can largely be traced back to one thing: scarcity. We don’t have enough homes, enough health care, enough childcare, enough education, enough reliable energy — you name it we don’t have enough.

At the root of these problems of scarcity are the restrictions we’ve placed around increasing supply. We aren’t able to build enough homes, provide enough education or healthcare because we’ve regulated ourselves to death. We’ve actively prevented people from rising to meet the demand.

It shouldn’t be this way. Montana is the land of natural abundance; we are the nation’s Treasure State. But now scarcity and conflict threaten to consume our state just like it did California, Colorado, and others.

My message today is that we can avoid that fate if we build on the Montana Miracle together. Working together, we can break down restrictions on supply that contribute to scarcity and conflict.

In addition to expanding the freedom of property owners to build affordable homes, let’s do more work to deregulate home based businesses, especially home-based childcare and microschools.

Let’s tackle climate change together by reforming the broken environmental permitting process to accelerate clean energy production, forest restoration, and critical mineral mining.

Let’s end the discriminatory practice of zoning children into public schools based on their address.

Let’s stop enforcing education uniformity and instead promote a pluralistic system of choice and innovation that prioritizes students and teachers over bureaucratic systems.

Let’s address protectionist Occupational Licensing schemes so we can license and train more healthcare professionals to overcome our workforce shortages.

Let’s accelerate the artificial intelligence and crytpo industries in Montana by proactively safeguarding people’s fundamental right to own and utilize computational power.

This can be Montana’s future, if we choose it.”

I’m already looking forward to the next Montana Festival in 2025. I hope to see you there!