Special session missing summer music
The floor of Nebraska's unique Unicameral Legislature. (Rebecca S. Gratz for Nebraska Examiner)
Smart money says no one in the 2024 Nebraska Legislature is humming along to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” Well, maybe the hot part.
Like Nat King Cole, Mungo Jerry and the Jamies, Sylvester Stewart filled his paean to summer with a festive joy, far different than the Sisyphean slog that has become the Unicameral’s special session on property taxes. Aside from some pronounced pre-session reticence and a clear vote on the issue in April, the assembled leaders are now awash in over 100 proposals “related” to property taxes in a lineup of acronyms — SMART, TABOR, EPIC, etc. — and the usual alphanumeric proffers of regular Unicameral business — LB 1, LB 69, LB 80, etc.
The Nebraska Legislature’s summertime task appears to have become a trudge.
As Speaker John Arch indicated a week into the proceedings, progress was slow. Frustrations, however, were running high in some parts of the chamber. More than a few senators saw no need for a special session to address a property tax situation on which they had their say during last spring’s business. They were also wondering how a single topic session had over 100 proposals in the form of 80 bills and 24 proposed constitutional amendments. At that point surely a mind or two in the chamber considered sine die more of a solution than a parliamentary exercise.
There’s more. Several business leaders have testified that from their vantage point they saw no property tax “crisis,” Gov. Jim Pillen’s term as he tried to pre-sell the special session idea in town halls across the state — excluding Lincoln and Omaha.
Which brings us to a two-fold concern. First, if the special session turns out to be simply an opportunity to workshop legislative ideas that might be introduced next January, it’s pricey. Best estimates peg the special session running about $18,000 per day. Of course, if senators achieve a landmark piece of legislation that solves all our property tax and public education funding issues … never mind.
Second, the opposite is always on the table: Either the laying of a goose egg or, worse, the miscalculating of the juice and the squeeze: That’s when policies pass that do little more than give proponents something to point to as success, but achieve nowhere near enough to have warranted a special session of the Legislature.
Baked into any discussion of tax policy, especially in a sparsely populated state, should be the idea that fair and equal are not the same thing, prompting a number of questions: What’s a “fair share”? Are all taxpayers treated equally? Should they be? And, if you want a stickier wicket, throw in exemptions.
As senators wend their way through the acronyms and alphanumerics, we should also remember that a new Legislature will show up next January, with new ideas and perhaps even its own new solutions to property taxes.
Whatever result (or lack thereof) the special session reaches, tinkering with property taxes means tinkering with public education funding. Even those of us who understand economics at the most rudimentary level understand that whoever signs the checks, captains the ship. Please excuse the extended metaphor but that also means a sea change in how we educate our kids. Senators need to think long and hard about the linchpins involved in funding public education.
Nor is the Legislature the only state body at it this summer. The State Board of Education, prodded by legislation passed this spring, released a grooming and dress code policy that local districts must adopt by July 1, 2025. The policy bars schools from interfering with students’ expression of cultural, ethnic or religious beliefs through their clothing or hair styles.
The code generally follows the principle established 55 years ago in Tinker v. the Des Moines School Board, when Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Irony could be afoot, however. A school district could allow students to dress and groom according to a cultural standard but keep them from exploring, enhancing and expanding their knowledge of such cultures’ histories because of banned books or white-washed curricula.
Meanwhile, back at the Capitol, the summer debate continues. At stake is not only a potential plan to ease the burden of property taxes, the frustration levels of senators, and the daily tab of $18,000 but also the structure, funding and future of our public schools.
Nothing fun about any of that.
