Nestled in the southwest corner of Montana are two towns that sit at the base of either side of a mountain range, but in recent years what has divided them has gone far beyond the 11,000-foot peaks of the Madison Range.
To the west of the Madisons is Ennis, a modest town known for its fly fishing. To the east is Big Sky, home to one of the largest ski resorts in the nation and the Yellowstone Club, where the ultra-wealthy and celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Tom Brady own multi-million dollar homes and have their own separate private ski resort.
The median sale price of a home in the greater Big Sky Area — not including the Yellowstone Club — is $5.7 million, nine times that of in the Ennis area, which is $620,000, according to internal data from the Bozeman Real Estate Group.
Big Sky sprawls across two counties — Gallatin County, and to the west, Madison County, where Ennis is located. The Ennis hospital district and the K-12 school district share a boundary with the Madison-Gallatin county line, so those districts split the ski town as well. This means that residents of the Big Sky portion of Madison County pay taxes that fund schools and a hospital in Ennis — an arrangement that has been in place decades.
There is an available hospital on the Big Sky side, and children in the part of Big Sky that is in Madison County can go to schools in a separate part of their town that is in Gallatin County.
But in recent years, Big Sky residents moved to stop paying taxes to Ennis to fund their own town instead. They said the Madison Range makes Ennis’s schools and hospital inaccessible — an excursion around the mountains would take three hours round-trip by car — and so they shouldn’t have to pay for them.
One road connects Big Sky and Ennis through the mountains, but its infamously poor condition has earned its own Facebook page. It’s a private road owned by one of the luxury communities in Big Sky and often takes as long to drive as it would using the paved roads that circumvent the mountains instead.
Ending the Big Sky tax payments to Ennis would have been a financial hit to the hospital and forced Ennis residents to pay a lot more in property taxes, while residents of Big Sky say their town has significant needs that taxes can help meet, and it should not be seen only as a playground for the rich that is trying to grab more money.
After years of fighting, the towns reached a compromise during this year’s legislative session through two bills which became law in May.
House Bill 846 increases Ennis’s financial obligation to Big Sky to fund the students who live in the Ennis school district but attend school in the Big Sky School District. Senate Bill 260 weans the Ennis-based hospital district off the property tax money that comes from Big Sky over multiple years, instead of all at once.
Prior to this legislation, the approach being discussed to solve the tax imbalance would have raised many Ennis residents’ property taxes tenfold, according to one estimate. And the Madison Valley Medical Center would have lost $2.9 million of the $3.4 million it receives in property tax funding. The Madison County portion of Big Sky alone accounts for 18% of the hospital’s overall budget.
Together, the bills serve as a “remarkable” compromise between the two towns, said one lobbyist who was central to how the legislation was crafted. But the road to achieving the final product appeared impassable at points, and bitterness from the disputes remains, highlighting how the rush of riches and people into the Treasure State has upset arrangements Montanans had lived with for years.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the test case of what money can do to our state,” said Amy Kelley, co-owner of the Gravel Bar on Main Street in Ennis. “This is a bellwether.”
As the tensions linger, some see the legislation as an example of how consensus can be struck even as Montana grapples with the economic distortions convulsing the state.
“There’s so few examples of success stories of counties working together or districts across counties working together well,” said Kristin Smith, a Bozeman-based researcher with a focus on rural economic development.
Still, the battle over taxes created deep divisions between community members, even leading to severed friendships for some.
Kevin Germain is one of those people who has lost friends over the dispute. He is the chairman of Big Sky’s Resort Tax Board, which acts as the community’s de-facto government because the area is unincorporated.
He lived in Ennis for a decade and his three children attended school there, but he has since moved to Big Sky and has been one of many looking for a way to recapture those tax dollars in the ski town.
“It’s been rough,” Germain said. He declined to elaborate strained friendships further, saying the situation is “so sensitive.”
Those on the Big Sky side are imploring people to see that their community is more than the multi-million dollar homes and billionaire residents. For one, they say they need to recapture the tax revenue that goes to Ennis to build out a better mental health system for the full-time residents.
While the factors that created this conundrum — the high concentration of multi-million dollar homes, the mountain range and rapid population growth — are unique to Ennis and Big Sky, they hold statewide relevance.
“It’s a microcosm of what’s happening in Montana,” said Democratic Sen. Cora Neumann, whose district includes Big Sky. “The resentment between all of the new growth and the money that has come into Montana is playing out in this scenario.”
What follows is the story of how the battle began, how it was fought, and how a compromise was eventually forged, based on interviews with residents and county officials in Ennis and Big Sky and state politicians in Helena.
Increasing population, wealth creates tension in Southwest Montana
More than a century before Big Sky was even a concept, the county lines were drawn.
“The very underlying issue was that that county line was misplaced,” said David O’Connor, executive director of the Big Sky Community Housing Trust who moved to the town in 1990. “That should have probably been rectified in the early ’70s when Big Sky was first conceived. … That Madison County line presents a lot of challenges. But you know, kind of the biggest one is that sort of tax equity challenge.”
But the origins of the modern dispute began in earnest in 2023, when Big Sky released a strategic plan that expressed the desire to capture more of its tax revenue and the increase in residents in the Madison County portion of Big Sky reached a “critical mass” and helped force the conversation, according to nearly every person interviewed by the Montana State News Bureau.
Over the last few years, Montana’s population has ballooned and huge amounts of money have been infused into the state — southwest Montana in particular has seen explosive growth. That trend has played a role in unattainable housing costs, displaced the workers these communities need to function and has created animosity across the region.
Big Sky’s population increased by 54% from 2010 to 2020 and currently hovers around 3,800 people. And the wealth of the area has grown as well: The taxable value of property in the Big Sky portion of Madison County has increased 94% from 2021 to 2024.
This past school year, 26 Big Sky students who live in Madison County went to school in Big Sky despite the fact that they’re geographically in the Ennis School District and their parents pay property taxes to that district. Because of how state law functioned prior to the new bills, those students were only being funded by a fraction of the money that it takes to educate a student in Big Sky. As for the hospital, a Madison County-Big Sky resident who has a medical emergency will in all likelihood go to the Big Sky hospital despite paying taxes to the hospital based in Ennis.
Big Sky residents and its leaders were frustrated that their tax dollars were funding services that were ostensibly unavailable to them, so they wanted to incorporate those tax dollars back into Big Sky.
Nicole Howard, who owns a condo at the base of Big Sky Resort and works in the town, shattered her tibia and broke her fibula while skiing this past season, leaving her in need of emergency surgery, she explained. Her property taxes go to the Ennis hospital, but she received all her care from the Big Sky Medical Center.
“The purpose of this bill is if you’re paying taxes for a district — whether it’s educational or a hospital-type district — you should have access to those services,” said Polson Republican Sen. Greg Hertz, who sponsored SB 260. He added that the piece of legislation was the “most difficult” of his legislative career, which has spanned more than a decade.
A resident’s property taxes largely fund the county they live in, their local schools and other local taxing jurisdictions like the hospital district.
How much a resident pays is based on the value of their home, so someone with a higher-value home like those on the Madison County side of Big Sky account for a larger portion of the money the district receives from property taxes.
So in Madison County, the Ennis School District and the Madison Valley Hospital District, most of the property tax burden falls onto the multi-million-dollar homeowners on the other side of the mountains in Big Sky because those homes alone account for 83% of Madison County’s entire value that’s subject to property taxation.
“We’re the welfare portion of this,” Kelley said. “We’re propped up by Big Sky, so why not go to the table?”
If the Madison Valley Medical Center in Ennis, a small critical-access and independently owned facility with four full-time physicians that mainly provides primary care services, lost the Big Sky property tax funding immediately, it would have had to cut services and lay off staff, hospital CEO Allen Rohrback explained.
“We got complacent … thinking that money from Big Sky would always be there,” Kelley said.
The financial threat to Ennis led some residents to fling accusations of greed at Big Sky, but many on the eastern side of the mountains are adamant that this is about “fairness” and providing necessary resources, like mental health care, for their own.
“We don’t want to pay taxes on something we don’t receive services for,” Germain said. “Rich or poor, we all feel the same on that point.”
How Montana’s new laws work
After years of white-hot county commission meetings, lawsuits and constantly increasing tensions, the debate reached a boiling point at the state Legislature this year.
The original version of SB 260 was less friendly to Ennis, and on a cold February morning, an Ennis Mustangs school bus carted dozens of Ennis residents to the state Capitol to vehemently testify against it in a hearing that dragged on for hours.
Some of the state’s lawmakers who are savviest at steering state policy and and a handful of big-league lobbyists held multiple meetings with officials from Big Sky and Ennis that weren’t open to the public where they ultimately hashed out the final version of the bills that both sides agreed to.
SB 260 gradually steps down Ennis’s hospital off the Big Sky payments entirely over an eight-year period. Currently, 85% of the funding the hospital receives from property taxes comes from Big Sky.
Rohrback said he’s confident the property tax base in Madison County with Big Sky carved out will be lucrative enough in eight years to help sustain the hospital. He believes home values will continue to appreciate and growth in the area will remain steady, which will help make up for the loss of the Big Sky property tax dollars years from now.
“The amount of time that we get, it really does allow us to make some good long-term plans,” Rohrback said. “We don’t anticipate any reduction in our services. In fact, we’re going to continue to grow with the community.”
When asked if it was a gamble, Rohrback said “potentially,” but pushed back.
“I think operating a small hospital in southwest Montana is challenging,” he added. “I’m not going to call it [a] gamble. We have a good long-term plan.”
On the school side, HB 846 will put in place non-voted property tax increases to help fund the children who go out of district, which will cause property taxes to rise for Madison County residents. But most of that increase will fall onto the Big Sky-Madison County homeowners because they make up the lion’s share of the tax base. The bill includes a formula that adjusts that amount if the student population decreases, or under what Big Sky School District’s superintendent Dustin Shipman sees as a more likely scenario: a continued steady increase in student numbers from that pocket of Madison County.
If the Big Sky-Madison County tax dollars stopped coming in entirely, property taxes would have ballooned, which would have also made it harder to pass future voted levies to fund school improvements. That would have “pitted property taxpayers against the district and harmed education and students,” explained Lance Melton, CEO of the Montana School Board Association.
“Both sides feel like they took it on the chin a little bit and I think that means it’s probably a fair compromise,” said Danny Bierschwale, executive director of the Big Sky Resort Tax Board. Nearly every person interviewed for this story invoked some version of that adage.
Big Sky officials told the Montana State News Bureau they would have liked to see a faster phaseout.
Jared Moretti, the superintendent of Ennis Schools, said he is displeased with the slight bump in property taxes Ennis residents will see as a result of the permissive mill levies that will help fund the Madison County students’ education in Big Sky, but even so, he took ownership over the children on the other side of the mountains.
“No matter where they come from, or, you know, I guess what their level of wealth or whatever is … they’re our kids, and we need to take care of them,” Moretti said. “No different than a student that lives, you know, just right down here, across the street from the school. They’re still our kids.”
‘How the rest of the state thinks about Big Sky’
Oftentimes when a ski resort like Big Sky Resort is established, there is a preexisting community with infrastructure to sustain its residents. Aspen, Telluride and Park City, for instance, were mining towns before people started flying in from far-flung places to ski. In Big Sky, that was not the case; it was “all sheep farms and sage brush,” Bierschwale said.
Bierschwale explained that part of the push for more tax revenues is an effort to build a community that functions properly for its increasing number of full-time residents.
“Education and health care are like cornerstones to a community. That’s kind of, for many communities, how you would judge your success: the quality of the school and the quality of the health care,” he said.
The community’s leaders say they’re going to use these tax dollars to build out their mental health and counseling services in town. Residents of ski towns face unique mental health challenges, something referred to as the “paradise paradox.” Suicide rates are significantly higher in ski towns than the national average.
“From my perspective, it’s more about, like, the eight suicides we had last year than it is about the [Yellowstone Club],” Bierschwale said. ” YC – it certainly overshadows many people’s perspectives.”
Many Montanans wince at the mention of Big Sky and don’t claim it as their own; the town is often referenced for its unabashed wealth and used as an example when talking about how the state has changed. Neumann, the Democratic state senator who grew up in Bozeman, said she also used to see Big Sky as “only for people with money.”
“As I’ve learned more about the community, and how hard it is for working families to make ends meet, I’m more and more frustrated with how the rest of the state thinks about Big Sky,” she said in a text message.
The towns that surround Big Sky — which includes Bozeman, the state’s fourth-largest city — are rife with disdain for the Yellowstone Club, and Big Sky as a whole. Dive bars and cars across the region are littered with cheeky stickers ragging on the wealthy enclave.
There is a sentiment not only in the Madison Valley and in Montana, but throughout the Mountain West, that newcomers who were not born and raised in the mountain town they move to are harming their adopted home. O’Connor arrived in Big Sky more than three decades ago when the population was well below 1,000 residents.
“People were pissed when I got here,” he said.
Given the inescapable bitterness over the growth in wealth and population, many see SB 260 and HB 846 as a novel way of responding to the drastic changes in these communities. Still, despite assurances of fairness from both sides and congratulatory handshakes having been traded at the Legislature, some continue to view this as the ultra-wealthy grabbing more money.
“It’s complete greed. Bottom line,” said Scott Kelley, Amy Kelley’s husband who co-owns their Ennis bar. “That place upstairs is a monstrosity,” he said of the Yellowstone Club.
“You bought it. You knew where the f — you were,” he added in reference to the Big Sky-Madison County homes. “There’s gotta be a price to pay for exploiting rural Montana.”
Smith said that sentiment is “not unexpected” in Montana’s communities.
“The perpetual problem in rural [areas] is that your community is changing in ways that you can’t control,” Smith said. “That’s been true in Montana since its beginning.”
In the final days of the legislative session, it was clear the two sides had finally arrived at a mutual agreement on both the hospital and school districts. But in the bill’s final public hearing in a stuffy room at the state Capitol, those who came to testify from the two Montana towns kept their distance before the meeting convened, sat on opposite sides of the committee room and barely made eye contact, even as the finish line was in sight.
“It’s still a live conversation,” Germain said. “This chapter is still being written.”
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