Ten days down, ten to go
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Feb 24, 2006 Posted by Bill Luckett
We've reached the halfway mark of the 20-day budget session, and to tell the truth, we haven't seen a lot of fireworks so far. Not that that's a bad thing. When we see, as I said, "fireworks," what that means is that people's passions and emotions can become larger factors in the decision-making process, and they can wind up making different decisions than they might otherwise under calmer conditions. We could consider ourselves lucky that we don't have doctors and lawyers at each others' throats this year, and we don't have federal officials holding emergency meetings about wolves while our legislative and executive branch officials grow increasingly impatient. And mainly, we can be grateful that lawmakers aren't strapped for cash just to keep the government afloat for another two years. That situation can make things very intense and very difficult for everyone involved in the session very quickly. Instead, part of the public debate this year is over what kind of tax relief to give to the people.
Last I heard, legislators are still planning on starting their work on the budget Monday. As is likely for a budget session, the budget bill will probably be the most closely watched and important bill lawmakers pass this year. Among the dozens or even hundreds of decisions the Legislature will make in the budget this year, one to watch closely involves perhaps the most basic form of tax relief lawmakers can provide: lowering the sales tax.
Gov. Freudenthal has asked legislators to make good on a promise our state government made to people more than a decade ago. Back then, when the state sales tax was raised to 4 percent, the state was strapped for cash. Lawmakers never like to raise taxes, but they way they brought themselves to do it back in 1995 was to pledge that if they had enough money to keep $35 million in the state General Fund at the end of a fiscal year, the sales tax would be lowered to 3.5 percent.
As Gov. Freudenthal noted in his State of the State address, that was a "little noted and apparently not long remembered provision" of the law that raised our sales tax. What has happened is, every year since then, the Legislature has made sure that the General Fund would not have $35 million in it, because they have stuck a footnote in each budget bill to make sure all but $10 million is swept from the General Fund into the Budget Reserve Account at the end of each fiscal year.
Since the "heat and eat" bill died, all other bills that could provide tax relief or other financial assistance to the people first require people to take action to qualify for the assistance. Otherwise, the government's going to keep taking their money. But, thanks to the 1995 law, legislators can still give us tax relief by simply choosing to do so. They clearly have enough money this year to do it. And while there are plenty of ideas - good ideas at that - about how to use the entire budget surplus in efforts to make our lives better, this is one way they can let each person in the state hold on to a handful of their own money to make their own lives better. That is just one of the many, many interesting decisions facing lawmakers next week as they begin their budget work.
Friday was the last day for bills on General File in either chamber to be heard for the first time before the full membership of that chamber. A handful of bills died, but there wasn't a lot of grief among the legislators I talked to about the bills that didn't make it. House Minority Leader Wayne Reese, D-Cheyenne, probably summed it up for many people when he told me, "What's left, I can take it or leave it." That's not saying that some people didn't care about the bills that died. But none of them jump out at me as bills of major public interest - unlike last year, when a bill to remove the sales tax on groceries perished because it wasn't brought up before the deadline.
So, next week, the budget. It will be interesting to see what changes lawmakers are planning even at this hour when they get their first crack at the budget bill. And while I'm excited, I'm even more excited about having the next two days off so I can show up Monday morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to take on the second half of the 2006 budget session. And I have a feeling our legislators, inasmuch as any of them will take two full days off, feel the same way.