If it seems that ads produced and paid for by the Montana Meth Project are everywhere in the state, no wonder.

According to IRS documents that nonprofit organizations are required to file, the Montana Meth Project and the Meth Project Foundation spent just under $20 million between 2005 and 2007, the most recent year for which information is publicly available.

In those years, nearly all the money was put up by the project founder, billionaire Tom Siebel, through the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation. Most of the money went toward the development and placement of anti-meth ads across Montana, on television, radio and billboards and in newspapers.

In the project's first two years, tax-exempt filings were made by the Meth Project Foundation, based in California, which administered the project in Montana. In 2007, after the project had begun to expand to other states, the Montana Meth Project formed a separate nonprofit organization and filed its own IRS reports.

Those documents show that the largest expenditures made by the Montana Meth Project have been for creation of the ads themselves. Venables, Bell & Partners, a San Francisco advertising agency, received $1.6 million in 2005, $2.1 million in 2006 and $1.5 million in 2007 for advertising development.

Public relations firms also were big beneficiaries of Meth Project spending. In 2005, DDB Seattle was paid just under $1 million for media and public relations work, and the Gallatin Group, based in Washington, D.C., received $216,571 for "public affairs consulting."

In 2006, DDB Seattle was paid $1.1 million, and OMD USA, based in San Francisco, was paid $230,413 for media and public relations. In 2007, $480,085 went to OMD USA, and Golin/Harris International, of Los Angeles, received $231,137 for media and public relations.

Peg Shea, the first director of the Montana Meth Project and now a volunteer consultant to the organization, said Venables was responsible for all aspects of creating the ads, including market analysis, the use of focus groups and the hiring of ad directors and production crews. The public relations firms were used to launch the project initially and then to launch the individual ad campaigns, as well as handling all publicity and media inquiries.

The spending on advertising and public relations is in keeping with the philosophy that Siebel introduced when he unveiled the Montana Meth Project on a swing through the state in 2005.

When he appeared at Castle Rock Middle School in September of that year, Siebel pitched his approach to fighting meth as a "consumer products marketing problem." Shea described Siebel as "a businessman who's willing to take a business model to a social problem."

Siebel also said when he founded the Montana Meth Project that this was a good state to launch in because the population was small and it would be relatively cheap to saturate the state with ads.

The project's financial filings do show that buying advertising space in Montana was much cheaper than developing and producing the ads themselves. In 2005, the project spent $883,268 on media buys. That rose to nearly $1.2 million in 2006 and dropped to $272,820 in 2007. The reach of the advertising was also expanded by the willingness of many media outlets to sell space at what Siebel called "dramatically discounted rates."

Other expenses over the years have included $499,000 for a 2006 documentary on meth in Montana; $132,685 for surveys in 2006; and $551,513 for surveys in 2007. The filings also showed that the Montana Meth project spent $187,801 on lobbying in 2006 and 2007. The Meth Project Foundation reported spending a total of $671,810 on lobbying in 2006 and 2007.

As executive director, Shea was paid $31,184 in 2005, $119,280 in 2006 and $130,000 in 2007, which she said included a $30,000 bonus.

Dennis Taylor, the former city administrator in Billings, was hired to replace Shea in March, but he resigned after a little more than a month on the job. He was succeeded in May by Bill Slaughter, formerly the director of the state Department of Corrections. Slaughter's salary when he left his state job in 2006 was $88,171. His salary at the Montana Meth Project is $100,000.

Shea started seeking private donations to fund the Montana Meth Project in 2006, when big donors included PPL Montana, which put up $250,000, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, which donated $100,000. In 2007, Siebel offered to match donations from private donors.

"That's when I put 65,000 miles on my car running all over the state," Shea said.

The Montana Meth Project's budget for this year is about $2.1 million, of which about half comes from state and federal funding sources and the rest from private donors.

The 2007 Montana Legislature appropriated $1 million over two years to the project, and the U.S. Congress approved a $1 million appropriation in 2008. This year, the Legislature again appropriated $1 million over two years.

In May, however, Gov. Brian Schweitzer used his line-item veto to reduce that to $500,000. Schweitzer said $500,000 was how much he pledged to support the project in the state's main appropriations bill. The money he vetoed was in the stimulus-spending bill, into which the Legislature added $500,000 for the Meth Project.

Schweitzer said the Montana Meth Project has to begin moving toward its goal of being privately funded.

"A deal's a deal, and the deal was that the Meth Project was going to be self-sustaining and privately funded," he said.

Schweitzer also said that Montana and Idaho are the only two states that provide state funding to their meth projects, but that apparently isn't entirely true. Of the other six states that now have their own meth projects, only the Wyoming Meth Project directly provided information on financing.

Directors of the other projects either didn't respond to requests for information or referred questions to the Meth Project Foundation, which provided only general information.

Jean Davies, director of the Wyoming Meth Project, said her program has a budget of between $900,000 and $1 million this year and is entirely privately funded, mostly by foundations.

Budget figures weren't available for the other states, but the Meth Project Foundation did describe the mix of funding in each state.

Arizona has a combination of public and private funding. The state funding came from a legislative appropriation that went to individual counties to be spent on meth prevention, at their discretion, and all of the counties opted to give the money to the Arizona Meth Project.

Idaho operates on a combination of public and private funding, including state and federal money, as does Colorado. Hawaii is funded entirely by private donations and Illinois relies on a mix of public and private funding.