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Legislative report: So many comp hours, so little time • Daily Montanan [1]

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Date: 2025-07-01

The problem didn’t start this year. In fact, it probably started, like so many things, around the COVID-19 pandemic when lawmakers had to figure out how to hold legislative meetings safely, without the spread of the virus.

But as the Montana Legislature has seen a record number of bill drafts, more interim committees in between legislative sessions, and implementation of a new database because the longtime computer server was nearly dead, the number of compensatory hours, — or additional work hours — Legislative Services Division employees have banked has ballooned to more than 15,000 hours.

The issue, first reported by the Montana Free Press, can be broken down in a number of ways. For perspective, 15,000 hours is roughly the equivalent of two-years’ worth of time. In a state department that numbers around 100, that translates to an additional work-month of time off for the average full-time employee, although the director of Legislative Services, Jerry Howe, notes that the comp time is not necessarily evenly distributed among all of its employees.

However, the burgeoning number of comp-time hours is an issue that continues to grow, and recently Howe and the Legislative Council, the bipartisan committee that manages the operations of the Legislature, met to talk about how to meet the challenge.

Comp time, which is used as a benefit to fairly treat staff members during the long and sometimes grueling legislative session held every two years for 90 days, is a tool to avoid what would be either an oversized staff or exorbitant overtime.

However, Montana law caps comp time at 120 hours per employee, Howe explained, and at the end of the year, any comp in excess of the equivalent of three full-time weeks off is wiped out, essentially shorting employees who have worked the hours but didn’t get compensated. That thought keeps Howe up at night.

“It’s not just that this happens every two years, for a busy session. It’s that we have people who work here their entire careers. Employee morale is my top concern,” he said. “I’ve got to figure out how we get our staff time to decompress, recharge the batteries and enjoy this beautiful state we all love.”

Montana Senate President Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, said that he wants to make sure the state is fair to its employees who have worked such long hours at the behest of the lawmakers.

“They deserve to either have the vacation time or a buy-out,” he said.

One of the other compounding factors in this comp-time puzzle is that the additional time is already on top of normal benefits, like personal time off or vacation time.

More work, same staff

The causes for the comp time conundrum are multi-faceted: High numbers of bills introduced, high number of amendments, extra committees during the interim, and new technology, including remote meetings that take considerably more time and expertise to run.

For example, two special committees created after the 2023 session included one established to consider voting regulations and another to look at the state’s judiciary, a top priority for the Republican majority. Then, there was a special committee during the 2025 session that investigated former Senate President Jason Ellsworth for ethical violations. Howe told the Daily Montanan that the committee took huge staff time, amounting to more than 1,000 hours after it was completed.

During session, the Legislative Services Division wrestled with a new database to track and display the committee meetings, all the bills and their respective amendments. It replaced technology that had been in use for nearly two decades, but was on the verge of failing after the original software developer said that it would no longer be supporting it, causing Howe and his information-technology team to begin migrating to a new server and software that would normally be a four-year process. Instead, his team attempted to do it in 14 months.

Also, a lawsuit now before the Montana Supreme Court regarding whether junque files, which are the drafting files kept by Legislative Services for every bill and resolution introduced, are part of Montana’s public records. That lawsuit, which is being litigated in part by a coalition of media, including the Daily Montanan, has also taken considerable time, Howe said — one of many atypical but not necessarily rare occurrences that has contributed to the increase in comp time.

“None of those things can be put off,” Howe said. “One thing that impresses me about the Legislative Services staff is how dedicated they are to the legislators and the legislative process.”

Howe said Montana has experienced busy legislative sessions previously. It has experienced busy interims — the time between the legislative sessions. But, it has never experienced busy times back to back to back, seemingly without an end. That trend, Howe said, is new.

No one solution, but several possible solutions

Howe also identified four different options or “levers,” the Legislature has to address the problem, including adding full-time staff; buying out compensatory time; limiting the number of interim studies; or limiting the number of bill drafts or changing rules about bills requiring legislative hearing.

“We have these different levers we can pull, and we have to decide which ones to pull and when, and it will probably be a combination of all of them,” Howe said. “You don’t get into this situation with one really busy interim or one long session. They build up. They accrue.”

Previously, the Legislature has considered “buying back” the comp time, Howe said, but that measure failed this session. In 2023, the Legislature spent $325,000 to buy down comp time. This session, there was a proposal for “buying back” another $300,000, but that failed.

Regier has been both the Senate’s top leader as well as a former Montana Speaker of the House. As a part of the Legislative Council, he said lawmakers from both parties are wrestling with this issue.

He said unexpected things, like the thousand-plus hours of work for the “Ellsworth investigation,” were unforeseen.

“I hope to never have another ethics committee meeting again,” he said.

Instead, Regier said the problem of too much work is something that is being created by the Legislature, therefore the solution probably lies within the Legislature, as well.

He said that legislative leadership needs to better prioritize bills and amendments to bills — which take top priority during the busy legislative session.

“Our legislative staff has delivered. They have an incredible work ethic,” Regier said. “Sometimes, our lawmakers don’t know what they’re asking.”

For example, holding a remote session can take days of advance notice and technological hurdles for the IT department in order to ensure that public participation, mandated by state law, can be available virtually anywhere in the state.

Regier said even some very small changes could make big impacts. For example, as the legislative session winds down, some lawmakers have less to do — no new bills to introduce. Instead, they begin proposing topics for lawmakers to study when the Legislature is not in session. And the number of study bills and topics has ballooned. Regier suggested that simply walking back the deadline for interim study bills could help lighten the workload.

Not just Montana

Howe, who has worked for the Utah Legislature and stays in contact with counterparts from other states, especially those in the West, says the problem is one that many western states are experiencing as national issues bleed down into state politics.

Howe said that in a place that prides itself on being a “citizen Legislature,” many Montana lawmakers aren’t experts in law or even how state code works. Sometimes, ideas from constituents come to Legislative Services scrawled on the back of a napkin or scratch paper. But taking those ideas and changing laws through the state’s code can take weeks or months, even for ideas that seem straightforward.

“These ideas seem so easy,” Howe said. “But most people just don’t have the understanding of how laws relate to one another and how they are organized in code. Public policy is not a simple endeavor. If it were, we would not need to meet constantly and continuously.”

Some of the increase in work is also natural, Howe said. Montana, like many other states in the West after COVID, is growing. And that growth can challenge laws or aspects that haven’t been touched for years — if not, decades.

“The policies of the 1940s and ‘50s don’t work anymore, and the policy needs to adapt to that environment,” he said.

Some of the work increase is also related to term limits. Many lawmakers request fewer bill drafts and have a better handle on state law the longer they serve in the Legislature, Howe said. However, with term limits, legislative staff is often re-teaching or explaining the legal and legislative process to new members.

“People kind of hit their stride when they’re nearing the end of their limits,” Howe said.

Howe would love to believe that the long hours and the complex back-to-back-to-back sessions and their interims were an outlier, but he said as the appetite to legislate continues to be brisk, driven in part by national politics, he is also looking ahead. And Montana, like many other states, may be called into special session to patch budget holes created by Congress.

If that happens, there’ll be a sort of double-whammy: More demand for legislative services and less time to spend down comp time.

“We don’t know what is in the ‘big, beautiful bill’ and how will affect us,” Howe said. “But cuts in Congress could mean a special session in Montana as well as other states.”

And that translates to more staff time for Legislative Services.

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