Representative David Beatty presented House Bill 864, the Section E companion bill, to a legislative committee hearing that detailed clarifications to higher‑education funding language, an inflationary increase to a tribal college payment rate, and a package of interim studies and reporting directives for education programs.

The sponsor said the bill’s purpose is to supply coordinating language needed for appropriations in House Bill 2 and to remove ambiguities that produced inconsistent calculations when analysts interpreted the community college funding formula. The changes include explicit wording so analysts from the Commissioner of Higher Education, legislative fiscal staff and the budget office will compute identical numbers when the algebraic formula is applied.

Beatty walked the committee through sections of the bill: clarifying weighted full‑time equivalents and how a factor is applied, reversing or adjusting payments when community college enrollment projections differ from final counts, and increasing the payment rate a tribal college receives for educating non‑beneficiary (non‑tribal) students from the $3,280 level set in 2015 to $4,183 (an inflationary adjustment). The bill also includes interim work for the Education Interim Budget Committee: a study of the state library’s interlibrary loan program and courier coverage, an organizational study of the Office of Public Instruction, monitoring of OPI’s database modernization and related IT projects, review of the Montana Digital Academy frontier learning lab, assessment of the Commissioner of Higher Education’s repatriation support team OTO program, and monitoring of an initiative at the School for the Deaf and Blind to recruit educational interpreters.

Beatty emphasized the companion bill’s coordinating function and said amendments would likely be needed to align HB 864 with other bills still under consideration (including bills on debt service/major maintenance and the STARS Act). Jenny Stapp, representing the State Library, and other informational witnesses were available to answer questions. No formal committee vote on HB 864 was recorded in the transcript portion provided; the sponsor said he anticipates executive action later in the week once companion bill text is formally dropped and amendments are prepared.