The Nebraska State Capitol Building in Lincoln. (Rebecca S. Gratz for Nebraska Examiner)
The Nebraska Legislature hit the sine die button recently, ending a jumbled, awkward special session on property tax relief.
Three aftereffects linger: the phrase “absolute minimum,” a flurry of football metaphors and the seemingly unanswerable question of what is “enough.”
More on that trio below, but first let’s go to the tape: The pricey three weeks did produce a result. Sorta. The governor signed a bill that edged the property tax needle ever so slightly toward relief, but nowhere near where special session boosters and ballyhooers believed it should be.
Blame for the flop began shortly after senators put the cat out and headed home. The session had a disjointed vibe, starting with some reasonable recalcitrance about even holding a special session long before the opening gavel fell. When selling the special session in town halls, Gov. Jim Pillen called property taxes a “crisis.” The subject has been front and center for decades in the Unicameral, so “crisis” was indeed hyperbolic. Plus, misrepresenting urgency can, as we saw, lead to quick, inefficient fixes or hasty, toothless policies.
Once in Lincoln, senators found themselves hamstrung with dozens of proposals. Changes to those ideas came, too, some on the fly, some from the governor’s office, some from committee chairs and some from individual senators, giving the process a clunky look.
At play in the governor signing something far less than what he touted in his pre-session campaign was repudiating the notion that adding to the sales tax was a good idea to offset any plan that reduces what appears on landed Nebraskans’ tax bills. Few inside the Capitol and out bought the premise that using a regressive tax to pick up the tab for property owners’ relief was an equitable solution.
Which brings us to the first of our triumvirate of observations: Among a variety of descriptions of such limited success, “absolute minimum” proved to be popular. Perhaps the frustration inherent in such language reveals the distance from the expectations to the actual results.
The legislators’ work rightly earned some criticism for its inefficiency but not necessarily for its effort. We witnessed a whole lot of squeezing before the special session (the governor and a group of legislators who helped him draft a property tax relief proposal) and during (senators, including the yeas, the nays and the neithers). But in the end the juice wasn’t there. Or, since football images carried sine die day, perhaps you would prefer that it was time to bring in the punt unit because at third and 10, the play gained just inches.
Speaking of which … the last day of the session brought us such gridiron gems as the fatalistic, “ We’re playing Oklahoma, we’re behind 42-7. Let’s go home and play them again next year.” The timely, “It’s the fourth quarter. It’s time to call a timeout. Give us the opportunity to run the set play we have to run to score, which changes the momentum in the game, and it starts with this vote.” And even the accusatory notion that the Legislature “quit at halftime.” Even the governor extended the metaphor, saying we could now “watch game film” to see where we could improve.
While I appreciate the scope of metaphorical possibilities the English language affords, and this is, after all, football-crazed Nebraska, what seemed to be missing was some figure of speech that captured the idea that perhaps the special session was, given considerable pre-session reluctance and in-session inefficiencies, simply unnecessary.
Finally, while my guess is that the word choice was inadvertent and not a call to look at the bigger picture, one senator mused that while the bill was something, it was not “enough.”
To which Nebraskans might ask “What is enough?” “Compared to what?” “And how will we know it when we get there?”
In a thoughtful piece in the Nebraska Examiner, writer Chris Chappelear made the point that the special session’s lack of success extended, in part, to the governor’s unwillingness to widen the lens on property taxes, including a close look at the underlying causes and conditions. Those include valuation formulas and other calculus, but also the changes taking place in who actually owns much of our land and how those purchases impact market values.
Please excuse the bad Rom-Com line, but “We’ll always have January.” Let’s hope that during the Legislature’s next regular session, when debate will inevitably turn to property taxes, the view will be wider, the language less dramatic and the process long and deliberate.
As for football metaphors, you’re on your own.
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