Carlson
Amy Carlson has a surefire way of figuring out if she’s on the right track in her job as director of Montana’s Legislative Fiscal Division.
“I always figure I’m doing the right thing when both sides are mad at me,” she says with a laugh.
Carlson took a circuitous route to her current role. An early interest in math and economics started her on a roundabout path to state budgeting work. She was first exposed to public policy while an undergraduate at George Mason University but ended up working for a Seattle-based steamship company when she couldn’t find a job in her native Montana in the late 1980s.
Carlson moved back to Montana a decade later when her husband’s work took them to Helena. She landed a job with the governor’s budget office and worked her way up to assistant director by 2003. Her career path then veered into the legislative branch when she was hired as director of the fiscal division in 2009.
The division’s work is similar to that of the budget office, with a notable exception. “There’s no difference in the subject matter, but who wants to know is a very different audience,” says Carlson, 61. “You’re communicating with a lot of people—in theory, 150, but in practicality, you’re really trying to communicate with 20 to 40 people so they understand the financial condition of the state at any given time.”
‘A Math Geek at Heart’
While numbers remain central to Carlson’s role in the Legislature, she also needs to summarize and present them to legislators. “I’m a math geek at heart,” she says. “Learning a broader set of skills was necessary, and it took me a while, but I think I’m better at that now.”
Colleagues say Carlson’s evolution from a budget wonk to a manager and leader has catalyzed a transformation of the office. “She’s taken the Legislative Fiscal Division to a new level,” Joe Triem, Carlson’s deputy director since 2012, says. “She has an endless supply of energy to do this kind of work. ‘Driven’ is putting it lightly.”
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Before her arrival, the Legislature “wasn’t really looking at fiscal policy,” Triem says, noting that Montana statute requires the fiscal division to help guide lawmakers on matters of fiscal concern. “What she did is she took that statute and actually applied it quite meaningfully,” he says. “If the Legislature just rubber-stamped last session’s budget with an inflationary increase, they need to know more about what’s driving that increase.
“It snowballed into us getting more into the data side of things, because they (legislators) saw how much value there was in questioning, not just rubber-stamping, billions of dollars of spending.”
Carlson’s 25-plus years of budgeting experience in Montana means she’s not bashful to tell legislators the cold, hard truth, Triem adds. “She’s not driving the bus telling them where to go, but she’s helping them understand. When she knows where they want to take things, she’s the one that can help them get that job done.”
Rep. Bill Mercer (R) has worked with Carlson since his first election in 2018, and the two have collaborated heavily on Montana’s Modernization and Risk Analysis project, known as MARA, since 2019.
MARA “takes us away from short-term thinking into not only creating really robust data sets, but then trying to use that to see where we are going to be in 2040 or some other distant year,” Mercer says. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to lead that effort, and I think she’s done a really good job of trying to be on the cutting edge. She doesn’t wait for us to come up with ideas on what we might want. She’s always trying to think about, ‘What is it that they need that they might not even appreciate that they need?’”
Impartiality Is a Prerequisite
Carlson’s management of MARA is representative of her broader work leading the fiscal division, Mercer adds. “To be able to do what legislators need, you’ve got to have great quantitative skills. You have to have the foundation of being comfortable with all things quantitative, and you have to be able to attract talent and inspire that talent,” he explains. “She’s done a really good job of acquiring talent, and I think that starts with the competency on the quantitative skills, but then she’s been able to inspire folks and keep them energized.”
MARA is just the latest step in a decadeslong process of using data streams to better inform lawmakers. “We’ve expanded out our data side of our shop considerably, to the point where we have an ability to not just talk about state government finance, but state government finance and policy choices,” Carlson says. “We’ve worked really hard to build that system up to the point where it could be recognizable by people who aren't data people. They’re regular people who have policy challenges.”
Along the way, NCSL, the National Association of Legislative Fiscal Offices, or NALFO, and the Western States Legislative Fiscal Officers Association have been instrumental in keeping her career on track. “NCSL’s essential to me,” Carlson says. “It’s an opportunity to learn from others who have been in similar positions. They’re just unique jobs, and it’s not like you get a training assignment or go to school to learn this job. That’s not a thing.”
One big lesson: Authentic impartiality is a prerequisite for the job.
“Being in a high-profile, nonpartisan role, you get a lot of critics,” Carlson says. “At first, that bothered me. But after a while, you get thick-enough skin to understand that this person’s frustrated for a reason, and you can understand and empathize with where they’re coming from.”
Eric Peterson is a Denver-based freelance writer.