HELENA – Greg Gianforte’s face lit up as he remembered trips to the backcountry with his family.
When he and his wife, Susan, were raising their children in Bozeman, Gianforte chose to spend three-day weekends in July and August while working at his former company, RightNow Technologies. They got off a hiking trail on Friday morning, hiked to an alpine lake, climbed a summit, and returned home on Sunday.
“No cell phones. No TV. Just God’s creation in the wild,” he said. “It was fabulous for our family and I can tell you it has instilled a certain resilience in our children that I don’t know how to get any other way . “
While Gianforte, the Republican candidate who runs to succeed newly-confirmed Home Secretary Ryan Zinke, personally advocates his connection to nature as the Montana way of life, the interplay of these values with his proposed policies is an admitted balancing act.
“I believe we can develop natural resources and protect the environment,” he said. “We have to find that balance – too often it’s just one side or the other.”
Gianforte ran as a job creator and athlete when his failed application for governor was last year. Now that he’s running against Democrat Rob Quist and libertarian Mark Wicks in a May 25 special election, he continues to advocate for jobs in the wood, coal and recreation sectors – all important aspects of the Montana way of life, he says.
Gianforte’s support for the hunt and the Second Amendment earned him support from the National Rifle Association.
“The NRA is honored to support Greg Gianforte and appreciates his support for the second Amendment,” said Chris W. Cox, chairman of the NRA-PFV, in a statement. “The NRA encourages all gun owners, hunters and athletes in Montana to vote for Greg Gianforte on or before May 25th.”
Gianforte takes a tough line against the sale or transfer of state.
“Public land brought me to Montana, and I made it very, very clear: public land must remain public,” he said, rummaging through a list of big game he and his family hunted on public land. “From a nature conservation perspective, we have to work to improve access to our public land.”
His stance against the public land transfer brings Gianforte into conflict with the Republican Party’s national platform, and regardless of the outcome of the Montana elections, Republicans will control the House of Representatives.
Gianforte says he believes in many aspects of the platform, but “no two people agree on everything,” and land transfer is one. When asked how he would act effectively against his own party, he referred to the negotiation of contracts with RightNow and said, “You can’t do that without finding common ground.”
He describes his approach as akin to a soccer game where he looks for three- to five-yard games to advance an agenda.
In order to promote public access to land, Gianforte supports the new permit from the Land and Water Protection Fund. The program uses offshore drilling royalties as a grant for conservation, including land acquisition.
Access to public waters and land became a hot topic during the governor’s race when Gianforte’s critics attacked him for suing the state of Montana in 2009 over an easement of his property in the Bozeman area.
A wealthy transplant from Montana, Gianforte was portrayed as a wealthy outsider barring the public from land to which they were entitled. At a landmark moment in the campaign, Governor Steve Bullock pulled the lawsuit out of his pocket and read from it during a televised debate.
Gianforte said the dispute stemmed from a government error regarding the place of easement and was settled with a handshake before the state was officially served. He dismissed the incident as “much ado about nothing,” but the political zeal earned him no praise from conservation and access groups.
“I moved a long time ago. The question is, did the message get through? I don’t think the story was ever told, ”he said.
The story, he says, is one of the frustrations over the state’s response or lack of it over 18 months. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks agreed within an hour of meeting on the property to relocate the easement and the lawsuit never went forward.
“That was a shot over the bow to have them call us back,” said Gianforte.
The public was never prevented from using other access points during the dispute, he said, adding that he supported the Montana Stream Access Act.
The lawsuit remains a major campaign issue as the state approaches the May 25 elections. It is often on Quist’s lips listing public land and access to its top subjects, and among those who hope the subject will hamper Gianforte again.
“When Gianforte tried to close our stream access, people took it personally. In fact, the Montaner Gianforte emphatically rejected this November because he had taken action against public land and against access to the electricity grid. Gianforte is inconsistent with the values of Montana and now wants a seat in the US Congress as a consolation prize, “said Juanita Vero, chairwoman of the Montana Conservation Voters, in a statement.
With this week’s announcement that the U.S. Department of the Interior will be reviewing two decades of national monuments, including the Missouri River Breaks in Montana, Gianforte is likely to be once again at odds with access and conservation groups who want to protect the land and public access.
Gianforte’s campaign manager says he supports the review of the Trump administration, thereby reiterating the often-voiced criticism of the federal transgression label. “(Gianforte) believes that these designations need to be carefully checked and implemented with local assistance. Any decision must take into account the concerns and impacts of the people living in the area. “
Gianforte takes a similar stance on land protected as wilderness and does not say whether he would support new wilderness designations, but he does not oppose the idea either.
“It’s very important to hear the community’s voice on these things,” he said.
In the case of a planned mine on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, Gianforte spoke out against it, he says after speaking to people in Immigrant.
Access to public land for Gianforte includes motorized access and multi-use management of non-wilderness state. Too many gates have opened on forest roads, he says.
“I’m not advocating ATVs in wilderness areas, but many other areas allow them to do this multiple use,” he said, adding that, in his opinion, travel plans have tilted towards non-motorized access. As an example, he cited the closure of motorized access for “wildlife protection” by the forest service as a violation of the federal government.
“When did the federal government become responsible for managing non-endangered species in our state? I thought it was FWP that did it, ”said Gianforte. “It’s the kind of hyperbole that infuriates people for stealing their way of life.”
Access also means access to commercial wood and other natural resources.
Gianforte did not name any specific land management reforms that he would like to see, but said the way federal forests are currently being managed is not working and not in the best interests of the Montaner from a health and safety point of view.
Gianforte would like more cooperation in forest projects and pilot projects that would test more state and local management and federal states.
Gianforte has mentioned some concrete reforms he may see for the Equal Access to Justice Act, which pays legal fees when individuals or groups successfully sue the federal government. The law is not limited to environmental disputes, but is often associated in the West with legal challenges in timber sales and other land management.
“I don’t blame the authorities, I blame the system we have put in place, the lawsuits and the source of income we have created for these environmental extremists,” he said.
Possible reforms include prorated reimbursements based on the number of successful points in a lawsuit and extending asset limits to nonprofits that currently limit payments based on the financial needs of a company or an individual.
Gianforte does not stop calling for the law to be repealed completely, saying the goal of equality is good.
Equal access to justice is often associated with the Endangered Species Act, which also has the ire of some conservative lawmakers seeking to develop natural resources. Gianforte would also like some refinements from ESA.
Restoration of species – like the sage, which narrowly missed ESA listing – needs to incorporate specific population targets, he said, and local input needs to be better considered.
“I think we make better decisions when they are made by the local miners here in Montana,” he said.
Regarding the possible deletion of the grizzly bear in an adjacent area of Yellowstone National Park, Gianforte says he believes science should be used to determine a healthy population. “And I’ll probably be one of the first to apply for a trademark,” he added of a possible grizzly hunting season.
President Donald Trump has proposed a number of funding cuts to departments that manage land and natural resources in Montana, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Gianforte says he supported an initial hiring freeze and believes in a generally smaller federal government.
“Let’s face it, our federal government is bloated,” he said.
One program he would push to continue funding is Superfund under the EPA, which is cleaning up industrial and mining landfills across the country, including more than a dozen in Montana. The federal government must “cut spending, but do it in a way that doesn’t harm Montana,” he said.
Proposed cuts by the EPA and other agencies include research and programs on climate change.
“First of all, the climate is changing,” he said, agreeing that humans affect the earth. However, he said the shedding of 7,000 jobs in Colstrip and the shutdown of coal-fired power plants will have a negligible effect, citing EPA data.
Gianforte had no concrete ideas on how to tackle climate change, but saw the general need to “bring common sense back to this policy and where there is a real legitimate threat to the environment we should consider measures to mitigate it”.
