Evansville Courier & Press staff report
INDIANAPOLIS - State lawmakers today are plowing through dozens of bills in hopes of beating today's deadline to amend bills - and Wednesday's deadline to pass House bills out of the House and Senate bills out of the Senate.
Lawmakers in both chambers are likely to work late tonight and again Wednesday night to meet those mid-session deadlines before taking a four-day weekend.
In the state Senate, Gov. Mitch Daniels' property-tax relief plan is broken up into several bills, some of which await floor votes.
One original element of the Daniels plan was eliminating township-level assessors and transferring their duties to county assessors.
Late Monday, senators amended the assessor proposal. Instead of eliminating all 1,008 township assessors, Senate Bill 16 would keep 44 of them in the largest townships of 15,000 parcels or more. The rest would be eliminated and their duties consolidated into the county assessors.
Bill author Sen. Connie Lawson, R-Danville, said she offered the amendment because she was concerned that county assessors might not be able to handle the workload in areas with large number of parcels.
The amended bill could be voted on conclusively on "third reading" by the full Senate today or Wednesday.
The Indiana House already passed Daniels' plan last week as one massive omnibus bill, House Bill 1001.
After the Senate and House trade bills, the real haggling and horsetrading begins as lawmakers try to compromise on which versions will ultimately pass.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.