House on food tax exemption: Try again
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Jan 17, 2007 Posted by Bill Luckett
The House Revenue Committee made such a complicated mess out of the food sales tax exemption bill that the full House on Tuesday voted to send the bill back to committee for more work. House members' frustrated reactions to the measure, House Bill 93, prompted House Revenue Committee Chairman Rodney "Pete" Anderson, to apologize for bringing it to the floor is the shape it was in. He said the committee will probably rework on the bill on Friday. More here.
It is extraordinarily rare for a legislative chamber to send a bill back to a committee. Normally, the chamber would simply kill the bill if it is in bad shape. But there is such a high level of interest in the food tax exemption that the House isn't ready to give up on HB 93 just yet. Frankly, if House Revenue Committee members are serious about wanting to make the food sales tax exemption permanent, they could accomplish that with the most simple piece of legislation you can imagine. However, some of them are interested in changing the distribution of sales tax revenues to make sure local governments don't suffer a net loss of revenue, and some also want the Legislature to review the exemption some time down the road (there was a provision in the committee's version of the bill to require the Legislature to revisit the issue in 2013). They know they have a better chance of accomplishing these secondary goals if they can get them worked into the primary bill, so they will probably continue trying to amend it.
Worth noting: The two Democrats on the House Revenue Committee, Mary Meyer Gilmore of Casper and Ken Esquibel of Cheyenne, BOTH spoke up against the complexity of the panel's changes to the bill, BEFORE House speaker Roy Cohee, R-Casper, said the bill was too complex and should be made as simple as possible.