Congressman Denny Rehberg

  WASHINGTON, DC - Montana’s Congressman, Denny Rehberg, is pressing the Bush Administration for full funding of the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program. 

“PILT is an essential funding program for Montana communities and counties,” Rehberg, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said. “There is a great deal of federal land in Montana taken off the counties’ tax roles, and that affects the counties’ ability to pay for important services - such as law enforcement, education, and healthcare.”

Rehberg, and other members of the Congressional Western Caucus, sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget’s Director, Josh Bolton, expressing concern the “PILT program has been funded at an average of only 60-percent of the authorized level, which has resulted in public land states losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars needed by local government,” the letter stated. 

“We remain unable to understand why this administration’s budget recommendations have proposed hundreds of millions of dollars for additional federal land acquisition each year, while at the same time the PILT requests have remained flat,” the Congressional Western Caucus wrote.

“The problem is that Congress is not fully-funding the program as it should, and this is leaving our county governments short-changed while the federal government continues to gobble up more land they can’t even afford to maintain,” Rehberg said.

Since local governments are unable to tax property values or products derived from federal lands, the PILT program is designed to provide federal compensation to counties and local governments to offset losses in tax revenues.  Fiscal year 2005 federal PILT program payments to the counties in Montana totaled over $17.18 million.

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