Even In Town Grandma Pays The Price For State Lands In Daniels County

By Tammi Fladager, Peerless Rancher

This is the third in a series of columns regarding the state lands issue that deeply affects the tax base of

Daniels County. In the first two columns, readers were

introduced to the issue and given some history as to how Daniels County wound up with so much land that was exempt from taxation.

So how does this state land thing affect Grandma, who lives one block off Main Street in Scobey, Montana? What would it look like if Governor Sam Stewart made good on his 1914 promise that, “The State Will Be Fair.”

There are a few ways in which money leaves or does not come back to Daniels County, directly related to the excessive, tax-exempt (cannot be taxed), state land that we have. The first we have discussed already, the nearly $500,000 that Daniels County is unable to bill for taxes. Because of this, our county has a myriad...