In the video above, Tim McGonigal talks with the two candidates for Montana House District 20 - Rina Fontana-Moore and Melissa Nikolakakos. Below are extended interviews with both candidates.
On the north side, District 20 is bound by the Missouri River from 15th Street North to 38th Street North where it stretches south to 9th Avenue South, then east to 33rd Street before moving north to 8th Avenue South where it extends west to 20th Street South, moving north to 3rd Avenue North and then back to 15th Street North.
Nikolakakos is the mother of four and spouse of District 22 representative George Nikolakakos. While she may lack a political resume, she has a long line of community service through leadership involvement in participation pre-school, PTA, and Girl Scouts, something that helped her decide to run.
“Following that community service, it's a way to be able to give back especially when it comes to education,” said Nikolakakos. “That's an area that I want to hopefully have some influence on and making sure that we, you know, keep things strong for our children.”
Moore is a Great Falls native. The former Great Falls High basketball standout and Northern Montana College graduate with a degree in construction has a professional land surveyor’s license, is a professional real estate appraiser and licensed home inspector. A strong union advocate, she says politics has always been in her blood and he public and private sector experience can serve constituents well.
“I can take that perspective and hopefully form something that we can work with at the state legislature so that we're not handing a bunch of unfunded mandates back to the counties and the cities because those are very painful,” said Moore. “Especially when we don't have a lot of money at the county and city levels to be spending.”
Nikolakakos says while knocking on doors she hears a lot of concerns about inflation and high prices. When it comes to rising property taxes, she feels the state has some tools at its disposal.
“The governor had that task force and he came out with the homestead exemption, which looks really promising,” said Nikolakakos. “Obviously, the devil's in the details. I want to read the bill carefully. But if done right, what it would do is it would give a tax break on your primary residence and long term rentals and hopefully up to maybe even 15%. Then that could shift that burden on to those secondary homes like Airbnb's and Snowbirds that don't necessarily pay income tax.”
Moore says she’s focused on education funding reform, election integrity and taxes. She says as a real estate appraiser she could see the issues with rising property taxes on the horizon several years ago. She says the Department of Revenue even warned the Republican controlled legislature about it.
“People are being crushed by property taxes and that has to be fixed,” said Moore. “That would have been a very simple fix. They could have just adjusted the tax rate. Years ago, they phased in the taxes over a seven year cycle when we had a boom like this. Then they moved it to every other year. When the value your value of your home went from $300,000 to $600,000, that was an incredible rate increase.”
Ballots will be mailed out October 11.
