Branstad: Find consensus on property taxes

DES MOINES - Gov. Terry Branstad said the Iowa Legislature will be making “a tragic mistake” if it adjourns without agreement on a commercial property tax reform proposal, and he challenged lawmakers again to pass bold education reform.

Speaking at his weekly news conference Monday, the governor said he has reached a compromise agreement on a property tax proposal with legislative leaders. The details are being drafted.

“It would be a tragic disservice to the taxpayers of Iowa to let another year go by without addressing this massive increase in property tax which will occur with no action,” Branstad said. “This thing has been around for 30 years. What I find amazing is no action has been taken in 30 years.”

He said while both the House and Senate leadership are in agreement on the proposal, “it does have to pass with a constitutional majority in both houses.”

Progress is being made on the property tax reform front, said Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs. Legislators and the governor are collaborating on a tax plan that should be drafted into bill form and released to the public “very soon,” he said.

“Governing is about finding common ground and I think Iowans expect us to reach across partisan divides and look for solutions to problems,” Gronstal says. “We're working on a property tax concept that embodies elements, in essence, of everybody's discussion.”

However, few of those legislative members who get to have their say on property-tax reform and other outstanding issues were at the Statehouse on Monday.

“The people that need to be here are here,” House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, said as he walked through a near-empty House chamber.

Those people are the leaders of the budget conference committees who will hammer out budget spending plans. Paulsen said there is agreement on an overall budget figure of roughly $6.244 billion, but how that is to be divided is still under negotiation.

He said lawmakers will be called back to Des Moines when those details are worked out, but he wasn't sure when that might be.

Branstad also said his team will “work very hard” to get an education reform package passed this year, saying he wants the final bill to look more like the “bold reform” the House passed and not the “watered-down” version approved by the Senate.

Rep. Royd Chambers, R-Sheldon, who stopped by the Statehouse on Monday after moving out of the apartment he had rented through April 30 for the session, said there has been some movement on the policy points of education reform.

Chambers and Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, are chairmen of the education reform conference committee, a separate panel that covers education spending.

“We're coming together on online learning,” Chambers said. “We still don't have an agreement on religious exemptions, assessments or third-grade retention.”