The claim is that Representative Llew Jones gutted the bill to pass something more complicated and buy its passage through subterfuge.

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A lawsuit filed in the Eighteenth Judicial District in Gallatin County by Senators (current or former), Montana Citizens, and taxpayers, Keith Regier, Greg Hertz, and Tom McGillvray, claims that Senate Bill 542, from the 2025 legislative session, violates Article 5, Section 11 of the Montana Constitution. They claim Representative Llew Jones of Pondera County’s District 18 (Conrad) worked with legislative staff to gut the bill of its original language, scheming to replace the simple language with something more complicated and unrelated to the bill’s purpose. Jones is running for the Montana Senate in 2026, which would put him well past twenty years in the legislature, having started in 2005.

Article 5, Section 11 of the Montana Constitution governs the legislative process for passing laws and includes several key provisions. One of those provisions states that a law cannot be altered or amended in a way that changes its original purpose.

The plaintiffs claim that:

“During the 2025 legislative session, supporters of a massive property tax restructuring bill faced a stark reality: their controversial legislation was dying. Their solution? Buy its passage with $90 million in cash rebates to Montana voters – a scheme they planned in advance and executed through legislative subterfuge.”

And that

“Internal messages exchanged between Representative Llew Jones and legislative staff reveal that Jones planned to gut SB 542 entirely. SB 542 was a simple three-page bill to temporarily freeze property valuations. Jones planned to replace its original provisions with a combination of cash rebates to homeowners and complex property tax rate restructuring. He made this determination 10 days before the House Taxation Committee held a hearing on the bill. At that hearing, neither Jones nor any other legislator disclosed the plan to Montana citizens who testified in support of what they believed was a simple property valuation freeze.

When later asked about using cash rebates to buy votes for a complex rate restructuring bill, Jones admitted: “On the rebate deal, I support it because now it’s what it takes to pass the bill … [S]ometimes, that’s the cost of doing business up here.”

Finally, the plaintiffs claim:

“Yet in the final hours of the 2025 legislative session, SB 542’s supporters did exactly what the Constitution forbids. They took a dying, 40-page property tax rate restructuring bill – one that the House Speaker himself called a “Frankenstein” bill – and bought its passage by bundling it with an appropriation for $90 million in one-time cash rebates.”

Senate Bill 542 was sponsored by Senator Wylie Galt of Meagher County’s District 39.

Below, Senator Greg Hertz of Lake County’s District 7, testifies to this claim on April 28, 2025, during a Senate floor session. “This one was amended pretty heavily. This bill no longer represents the original intent of this bill, which was to freeze certain property tax values….”

Below is Jones at a committee hearing on April 29, 2024, discussing “the cost of doing business up here.” Something the plaintiffs claim “is textbook “logrolling, which includes “bundling unpopular legislation with more palatable bills, so that the well-received bills would carry the unpopular ones to passage. People v. Wooters, 722 N.E.2d 1102, 1112 (Ill. 1999). Courts have long recognized that this practice is “both corruptive of the legislator and dangerous to the state.” Power, Inc. v. Huntley, 235 P.2d 173, 199 (Wash. 1951), quoting People ex rel. Drake v. Mahaney, 13 Mich. 481, 494-95 (1865).”

Below is a copy of the 155-page lawsuit. Please note the cited internal Teams messages between Jones and legislative staff, along with the lawsuits’ critical facts that follow. The remainder of the lawsuit lays out in detail the plaintiffs’ research.

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