A Montana county commissioner lost his Republican primary this month after suggesting his coal-dependent county should have a backup plan. The word that sank him, by his own account, was transition.
Musselshell County Commissioner Robert Pancratz was defeated by Mark Olson by 26 percentage points — a two-to-one margin — in a race that turned almost entirely on his cautious stance toward the Crow Revenue Act, a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Steve Daines that would transfer federally held coal to Signal Peak Energy through a private intermediary.
The county is home to Roundup, Montana, where Signal Peak operates the state's only longwall coal mine. The vast majority of that coal is shipped to Asia.
Here is the wrinkle Pancratz tried to flag: under the bill as written, Musselshell County could lose as much as $11.6 million in tax revenue if coal prices run high, according to his own calculations as a risk analyst consultant. The commissioners had been told by the bill's supporters, including Signal Peak, that the county wouldn't lose revenue.
Pancratz told Inside Climate News the commissioners were upset because they felt misled by the bill's supporters about the county's potential revenue loss.
He and fellow commissioners lobbied for amendments to guarantee the county some revenue from the land transfer. Pancratz also proposed contingency planning in case coal revenue ever dried up — language that opponents seized on.
Pancratz explained that his use of the word 'transition' led opponents to portray him as anti-coal.
A recording of a commissioner meeting, posted to a local Facebook group by a Signal Peak employee less than a month before the election, showed the three commissioners strategizing about how to pressure Daines, including a suggestion to request a $100 million endowment as a negotiating lever. Commenters accused them of playing chicken with the mine.
Olson, who serves as undersheriff in neighboring Golden Valley County, entered the race after his cousin Alan Olson — a former state legislator and former executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association — urged him to run in support of the mine. He has since been briefed on the county's fiscal relationship with Signal Peak by the company's CEO.
Olson has expressed that while maximizing county revenue is important, he believes protecting the mine's continued operation is the priority.
The mine itself has a complicated history. Signal Peak is on probation with the U.S. Department of Justice after criminal convictions for environmental and safety violations, with a federal investigation that produced additional convictions for bank fraud, cocaine trafficking, firearm violations, tax evasion, and money laundering in the years after Signal Peak took over the operation in the late 2000s.
The conventional read on a story like this is that it's about coal politics. It's also about something quieter: how hard it is for a community to plan for the day after, when the day after threatens the only employer in town. Hundreds of jobs in Musselshell County depend on the mine. A former commissioner quoted in the piece worried that Olson's win sets back economic diversification efforts in a county already trying to recover from decades of boom-and-bust infrastructure decay.
Olson will likely run unopposed in November. Pancratz says he holds no animosity, and plans to keep pushing for diversification in his remaining months in office.
The takeaway worth sitting with isn't about one Montana primary. It's about who gets to ask the long question — what happens when this runs out? — in a town where the answer feels too expensive to think about.
