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Lots of bills in Education Committee

In looking back at the list of bills and resolutions the Education Committee has heard or are going to hear, this is what I found: 68 total bills were heard, of which 31 were potentially going to be a cost to the state, 21 of the total had at least one amendment, with one of those bills having three amendments. As an aside, let me take a moment to get into amendments. Now, amendments can come as friendly, which was most cases in our Education Committee. That being said, other committees have seen amendments that totally change the bill to the point where the bill’s sponsor would vote against the bill. Back to bill information, as near as I can tell, we passed about half of the total bills out of our Education Committee. The other half have been tabled for one reason or another. This coming week, I will look in both my other committees, Energy and Tax, for some of the same data.

We did get a total of all bills introduced during this legislative session. That total is 1,636 introduced (with possibly a few more hanging out there). The total number of bills that were requested to be drafted was right at 4,600. The record for introduced bills was in 1973, with total bills of: 2,654 bill draft requests, with 2,211 introduced, and 1,193 passed. It remains to be seen how many the total passed will be for 2023.

A bit of follow-up from last week regarding tax credits or abatements. When deciding to vote for or against a bill offering tax credits or abatements, I consider that the credit essentially represents a shift in who pays the tax. If it is a property tax credit for one group, then remaining taxpayers are left to cover the difference. The majority of property taxes collected will be dispersed to schools, with a little bit to the state, and the rest to the counties. The decisions for how to distribute collected taxes are made at a local level for the most part. Those are the levies you all vote on, libraries, school, roads, streets, parks, etc. We did have a bill come to our tax committee, the intent of which would allow counties complete jurisdictional decision-making over calculating levies. If you would like to read it the bill number is SB 548. As always, stay safe!

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Sen. Russs Tempel, R-Cheste, can be emailed at [email protected] .

 

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