Guest opinion: County did lower taxes, just not by what your bill says

Every budget season the Flathead County commissioners praise their own “habit of fiscal discipline,” and for six years they’ve told us they lowered our county property taxes. For most of us that’s true. It just isn’t the whole story.

To find out how much we actually saved, I pulled the 2021 and 2025 tax bills for 594 homes across the county. On a typical home, the county’s share fell about $67 over four years. Most homes landed somewhere between a $173 cut and a $92 increase. Almost one in four paid more in 2025 than they did in 2021.

Working that out for yourself is harder than it should be. Two charges that used to sit inside the county’s section moved out of it in 2023 — FECC SPECIAL DIST and COUNTY LANDFILL on the 2021 bill, which appears as FCSW Fee – Residential in 2025. You still pay both to the county. They just stopped showing up on the county’s subtotal line.

That matters more than it sounds. Line up the two county subtotals without adding those charges back and the cut looks $136.66 bigger than it really was on the average home. To compare apples to apples, add those two items to your 2025 county total before you measure it against 2021.

There’s one more thing to consider. In Kalispell, Columbia Falls and Whitefish, fire and ambulance service is paid for by the city and shows up in the city’s share of property taxes. Out in the county, these services are paid for separately, either through a local fire district or, where there’s no district, a county fire service charge. That charge moved off the county line too, so add it back in if you see it on your bill.

For many county homeowners, fire district fees stayed about the same. Across the 291 sampled homes outside of Evergreen that pay for a fire district, fees moved only about $3 on average, keeping the county’s cut mostly in the homeowner’s pocket.

Evergreen is an exception, and it’s a big one. The average home there paid $219 more in fire levies while the county collected just $69 less. Taken together, the average home in Evergreen paid $149 more in 2025.

A commissioner may say that Evergreen voters approved that levy, and they did. But let’s look at what is driving these asks. Evergreen answered 454 calls in 2004 and 2,314 in 2023. That’s five times the work in less than 20 years. Bigfork ran about 300 calls a year in 2010 and runs about 1,300 today. Both districts have gone to their voters since 2024, and both levies passed. The Bigfork levy hasn’t hit tax bills yet, but it will this year.

The commissioners decide where new homes go in the unincorporated county. Those decisions determine how many people a fire district will be serving ten years from now. But the bill for that service arrives as a district levy, not under the county’s subtotal, and nobody has to answer for it at the county courthouse. If you’re a county commissioner, this lets you blame someone else for costs that you played a big role in creating. Our county commissioners should prioritize creating a long-term plan and vision for Flathead County that considers these costs instead of looking at everything as a one-off and saddling existing residents with higher overall costs as a result.

So, to recap. If you’re the average Flathead County homeowner, you have probably saved enough on your county property taxes over four years to cover a few cases of beer or a night out to eat with your significant other. I won’t minimize that. Money back in your pocket is money back in your pocket. 

But your mileage may vary, and if your fire district had to ask voters for more to keep an ambulance arriving quickly, you may well have paid more overall.

Go look for yourself. Pull your 2021 and 2025 bills at taxes.flatheadcounty.gov and compare them. To make it easier, I built a calculator at electdugan.com/tax-calculator that lines the two bills up on the same items and tells you what you actually saved, if anything.

Nathan Dugan is the Democratic candidate for Flathead County commissioner.