HELENA -- A trio of Montana ballot-measure proposals, including one to limit state spending, has been bankrolled so far by a group that won't reveal its donors, campaign-finance records show.

The group is Montanans in Action, which has spent about $49,000 to jump-start the campaigns and signature-gathering for Constitutional Initiatives 97 and 98 and Initiative 154.

CI-97 would cap state government spending, limiting it to the growth in the rate of inflation and state population. CI-98 would make it easier for people to attempt to recall judges. I-154 makes it harder for government to use "eminent domain" powers to condemn private property.

Supporters of the three measures are gathering signatures to attempt to qualify each for the November ballot.

Montanans in Action is what's known as a 501c4 nonprofit group, which does not have to publicly divulge its financial backers, said its executive director, Winifred rancher and political activist Trevis Butcher.

"It's an educational group," Butcher said Tuesday. "It's working on all sorts of issues along these lines, especially private property rights."

Butcher also is helping coordinate the campaigns for CI-97, CI-98 and I-154.

Butcher said he and others formed Montanans in Action early this year. Its financial supporters are people and organizations "who believe in responsible government and want to see citizens directly involved in the process," he said.

Butcher said they don't wish to be known publicly, and that the law doesn't require their disclosure.

One of the chief opponents of CI-97 said Tuesday that using Montanans in Action to finance the initiative campaigns is an apparent effort to conceal who's behind them.

"Who are 'Montanans in Action?' " said Eric Feaver, president of MEA-MFT, a union representing thousands of public employees. "We've been around forever; we're not a mystery to anybody. But when you say you're 'Montanans in Action' and don't give any names, then what is it?"

MEA-MFT has been bankrolling the campaign against CI-97, using money from its member dues, he said.

"It's not too hard to tell where our money's coming from, because it comes from our members," Feaver said. Those members include schoolteachers, prison workers, college instructors and professors and private health-care workers, he added.

Montanans in Action has given $20,050 to the CI-97 campaign, or 87 percent of the campaign's money, and virtually all of the $29,500 for the campaigns of CI-98 and I-154. Individual Montanans have donated $2,000 to support CI-97, which is the spending-cap measure.

Most of the initiative campaigns' money has been spent on three items: Legal fees, a signature-gathering consultant in Arizona, and repaying $25,500 in start-up loans from Americans for Limited Government, an Illinois group supporting the measures.

Butcher said it's likely the campaigns will hire people to help collect signatures to place the three measures on the November ballot. They have until late June to gather and verify the signatures of registered voters to qualify the measures for the ballot.

CI-97 and CI-98 need about 44,600 signatures each to qualify for the ballot; I-154 needs half that amount.

Butcher also reported a personal "in-kind" donation of $21,000 to the three separate efforts, as time and office use he's donated to the cause. If some money is left over in campaign coffers later on, he said he may be reimbursed for his time, but he said he's not counting on it.

MEA-MFT has contributed $20,000 in cash to Not in Montana-Citizens Against CI-97 and led the public campaign against the measure. It also has given "in-kind" contributions of staff time to the anti-CI-97 campaign.

Feaver said he believes much of the money backing CI-97 is coming from outside the state, because it's part of a national campaign by anti-government groups.

Similar spending-cap measures are being promoted in at least a half-dozen other states, he said: "We won't want whatever it is that is being sold in Maine, or Oregon, or Ohio or Oklahoma. This sounds like the same story, different state."