Legislative Report: Feb. 27, 2023

It’s day 32. We are just a couple of days ahead of crossover. We have acted on 312 bills so far and have 79 to go. The House has already sent 272 to the Senate, which we will get started on after crossover. The House still has 118 to act on before crossover.

This week we did pass two bills related to tax relief. One was the Homestead Tax Credit. This bill has $165 million to be distributed through the Homestead Tax process. Another property tax bill passed by the Senate will buy another 20 mills from our school levy. This will cost around $200 million; it is intended to create some local property tax relief. There are several other ideas related to property tax but they have received Do Not Pass recommendations from the committee. They have yet to be acted on by the entire Senate. We are expecting the House to pass an income tax reduction bill that would provide $350 million in income tax relief.

There are also a lot of ideas floating around to spend additional revenue. As of today’s budget, we are still about $1 billion over a balanced budget. The folks working on the human services budget are spending a lot of time trying to figure it out. It has $5.5 billion in asks. There are hundreds of programs. Their task is to sort out each one of the programs to see how worthy they are and if they even need to continue. It is a huge task. It seems every program has a face that it helps. We need to ensure it’s a citizen’s face, and not just another program with another employee. It’s not easy. We will hear that budget on the Senate floor in the next few days. As I said, it’s enormous.

Stay tuned.