District Judge Thomas Honzel, set to retire after this year, came out Friday with what has to be among his more monetarily significant rulings. He said power producer PPL Montana owes the state $41 million in back rent for the riverbeds its dams were built on.

The finding certainly is a far cry from the scene 100 years ago, when Montana residents couldn't get electricity quickly enough and no one would have dreamed of making power providers pay for placing dams in state-owned rivers. Where else were they going to put them?

Besides, it wasn't as though anybody else -- other than a few tiny aquatic creatures and some spawning fish -- was going to be using those river bottoms.

But Honzel agreed with Attorney General Mike McGrath, who said this week that "everybody else that uses state lands has to pay a fee. There is no reason that this business, which is extremely profitable, should be singled out not to pay the fee that every other state-lands user has to pay."

Not only did Honzel put an end to PPL Montana's free ride, but he also adopted the rent-setting calculation process that had been proposed by University of Montana economist John Duffield that based the rent on a share of the utility's net profits based on the percentage of state land that it used to produce those profits. That rental charge varied among the company's Montana dams, but added up to the $41 million over eight years dating back to 2000, when PPL Montana bought the dams from the defunct Montana Power Company.

The money, if PPL Montana decides against appealing to the state Supreme Court or loses such an appeal, would be earmarked for public schools. The extent to which the costs eventually would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity rates would depend on the Public Service Commission, but the rent obviously would make up part of the cost of production.

Ultimately, it seems to us that the case boils down to fairness. It is difficult, now that so many years have passed since building electricity-generating dams was a pioneering business, to justify allowing just one sort of activity off the hook when everyone else using state lands must pay for the privilege. It's hard to see how Honzel could have ruled any other way.