By Bryan Corbin, Evansville Courier & Press
INDIANAPOLIS - Negotiations on a final property-tax relief deal continue behind closed doors today with one of the negotiators reporting "pretty good progress."
Senate Republican negotiator Luke Kenley has been in talks on and off this week with his House Democratic counterpart, Speaker Patrick Bauer, on the details of a property-tax relief package.
"We had good conversation this morning," Kenley, R-Noblesville, said this afternoon. "We're getting down to trying to wrap this up. "
Midnight Friday night is the Legislature's adjournment deadline for the year, and Gov. Mitch Daniels has said that if lawmakers don't pass a relief-package by then, that he will call them back into special session.
As originally approved by the Democratic-controlled Indiana House and modified by the Republican-controlled state Senate, the relief package, House Bill 1001, would cap residential property taxes at 1 percent of assessed value and pay for it by increasing the 6 percent sales tax to 7 percent. Requiring referendums on public construction projects, eliminating township assessors, having the state take over school-operating costs and child-welfare costs, and capping property taxes in the state constitution were all elements of the Republican plan.
Late Friday, however, House Democrats issued a new counteroffer that took off of the table the proposals on referendums, township assessors and a state takeover of levies. That has prompted the give-and-take of the House-Senate negotiations this week.
"Yesterday was a pretty tough day," Kenley said of Tuesday's negotiations with Bauer, D-South Bend. "The end of the session is near. People are starting to have the will to kind of settle our differences, but it looks good."
Kenley said the issue of township assessors - whether to eliminate all of them and have county assessors take over their offices, or whether to keep some of them - will be addressed in House Bill 1001 after all, and not in a separate bill.
"I think we're going to deal with the assessor issue in 1001," Kenley said. He would not discuss details of that or elaborate on any other sticking points in negotiations.
Asked about the mood or tenor of the negotiations, Kenley said wryly: "friendlier ... friendlier than yesterday."
Time is running short to reach an agreement, get it framed into legal language and circulated to House and Senate members as a conference-committee report that they can vote upon before Friday night's deadline. The wording is complex; the earlier Senate version was 882 single-spaced pages long.
Tuesday, Daniels told a group of Delaware County taxpayers visiting the Statehouse that he thought the House-Senate negotiators were close to a deal on the relief package.
Meanwhile, the author of the three-strikes immigration bill, Sen. Mike Delph, said he may try to resurrect that legislation in a different bill, since the current version, Senate Bill 345, appears to be stalled in the House, with conference-committee members not yet appointed.