In Montana Environmental Information Center v. Department of Environmental Quality, 1999 MT 248, 988 P.2d 1236, the Court was asked to decide the extent of environmental damage that must be demonstrated before the protections provided by Montana's constitutional right to clean and healthy environment can be invaded. The district court held that because imminent threat to public health or water quality was not demonstrated by discharge of underground water which included higher levels of arsenic, the constitutional right to clean and healthy environment found at Article II, section 3 of the Montana Constitution was not implicated. In the Court's opinion authored by Justice Trieweiler, he wrote, after analysis of the minutes from the Constitutional Convention that:
The delegates did not intend to merely prohibit that degree of environmental degradation which can be conclusively linked to ill health or physical endangerment. Our constitution does not require that dead fish float on the surface of our state's rivers and streams before its farsighted environmental provisions can be invoked. The delegates repeatedly emphasized that the rights provided for in subparagraph (1) of Article IX, section 1 are linked to the legislature's obligation in subparagraph (3) to provide adequate remedies for degradation of the environmental life support system and to prevent unreasonable degradation of natural resources.
We conclude, therefore, that the district court erred when it held that Montana's constitutional right to clean and healthy environment was not implicated, absent a demonstration that public health is threatened or that current water quality standards are affected to such an extent that a significant impact has been had on either the Landers Fork of Blackfoot River.
We conclude that the constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment and to be free from unreasonable degradation of that environment is implicated based on the Plaintiffs' demonstration that the pumping test proposed by SPJV would have added a known carcinogen such as arsenic to the environment in concentrations greater than the concentrations present in the receiving water . . . .
Open Government
In Great Falls Tribune, Inc. v. Day, 1998 MT 133, 959 P.d 508, the Court was asked by the Great Falls Tribune to determine whether the director of the Department of Corrections could exclude members of the public from meetings of the committee established by the Department to screen proposals for the operation of private correctional facility in Montana. The director instructed committee members that the information provided to them by private contractors could not be discussed with anyone outside the committee. The District Court in which the Tribune's petition was initially filed, concluded that the initial negotiations could be conducted privately. On appeal, Justice Trieweiler, writing for the Court, wrote that Article II, section 9 of the Montana Constitution gives citizens of Montana the right to observe the deliberations of all public bodies absent an individual interest in privacy and that other than legitimate trade secrets submitted as part of the private vendor's proposals, they ad no expectation of privacy included in the information submitted. The opinion held that:
[The] Department's committee meetings have not been closed in this case for reasons of privacy; they have been closed to gain economic advantage. However, there is no exception provided in the plain language of Article II, section 9, for the State's economic advantage. As we noted in Great Falls Tribune, a public agency's desire for privacy does not provide an exception to the public's constitutional right to observe its government at work.
. . .
. . . The delegates to the constitutional convention made a clear and unequivocal decision that government operates most effectively, most reliable, and is most accountable when it is subject to public scrutiny. It is that fundamental principle of the State's constitutional law which is the bias for this Court's decision.
While on any given occasion there may be legitimate arguments for handling government operations privately, the delegates to our constitutional convention concluded that in the long-term, those fleeting considerations are outweighed by the dangers of a government beyond public scrutiny . . . .
In Roosevelt v. Montana Department of Revenue, 1999 MT 30, 975 P.2d 295, the Court was asked to decide whether a real property valuation statute which phased in changes in real property value for purposes of property tax assessment after 1996 violated the right to equal protection of the law for property taxpayers like the Plaintiff whose property had declined in value, but who continued to pay taxes based on the property's former value, while those property owners whose property had increased in value paid taxes on less than the property's current market value. In an opinion which held that the statutory scheme violated the right of some taxpayers to equal protection under the law, Justice Trieweiler wrote:
Although we agree that there is a legitimate state interest in reducing reliance on property taxes and avoiding further property tax increases, we conclude that taxing property owners, such as Roosevelt, based on 124 percent of the market value of his property, while taxing others in the state as less than the full market value of their property, is not rationally related to those objectives. Furthermore, we conclude that creating a class of property owners whose taxes are assessed on a basis greater than the market values of their property while other property owners are assessed based on the actual, or less than the actual market values of their property, causes the property owners in the first class to pay a disproportionate share of this state's property taxes, in violation of the equal protection clause found at Article II, section 4 of Montana Constitution . . . .
