Gianforte's Next-Door Neighbor Slammed With A 70% Tax Hike

PAID POLITICAL CONTENT

Governor Greg Gianforte’s next-door neighbor in Bozeman is considering selling the family home she grew up in, after the governor slammed her with a nearly $5,000 property tax increase in 2023.

“I checked online right when [the bill] came out and went, ‘holy crap—there it is!’” Deborah Newville, a Montana resident, says in an emotional video released by candidate for governor Ryan Busse.

Newville recently moved back into her modest family home in Bozeman, directly across Manley Road from one of Gianforte’s homes.

Public records show New-ville’s property taxes increased $4,835 in 2023, bringing her total property tax bill to a staggering $11,683.81. This is 70.6 percent more than the $6,848.47 Newville paid in 2022.

Gianforte’s property taxes in Bozeman, however, increased only 19 percent last year, even less than the median residential property tax increase of 21 percent. Public records show Gianforte paid $5,947.63 in property taxes at his home in Gallatin County in 2022, and $7,088.91 in 2023.

Busse, an avid outdoorsman and former firearms executive, is running for governor to make sure Montana works for all Montanans, not just the rich and well-connected. Busse will put an end to Gianforte’s property tax hikes that are pricing regular Montanans out of their homes.

“At this time in my life, I’m on a pension,” Newville says in the video, which is available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlXFNdr4fy0. “I’ve retired and my husband is on Social Security.”

“Deborah is like so many Montanans who’ve been hurt and forced to make painful decisions by Gianforte’s record property tax hike on homeowners,” Busse said. “Billionaires like Gianforte may not feel a tax hike like this, but ordinary families do. He raised taxes on people like Deborah in order to let big corporations off the hook—turning Montana into a playground for the wealthy and making our state unaffordable for ordinary people like Deborah.”

“The current property tax is certainly unfair,” Newville says in the video. Her late parents bought the property in 1968, and her father was a professor at Montana State University. Purchasing the property, Newville says, was her parents’ “dream.”

“Dad’s wishes—and my mother—was to keep it in the family and to have them inherit it,” Newville adds. “It would make me very sad to sell it. Not just me, but my whole family...It’s not the outcome—”

In the video, Newville pauses to wipe away tears before adding, “it’s a lot of pressure to try to keep it right now.”

In Culbertson in 2016, then-candidate Gianforte said “the fairest tax is the one you pay and I don’t.”

Paid for by Busse for Montana, PO Box 8537, Kalispell, MT 59904, Democrat.