by Gongwer News Service
September 29, 2008

To the elections and lame duck.

Aside from interruptions for planned sessions on two separate days by the House and Senate, the legislature has split town for the next five-plus weeks to focus on the November general election.

Then there will be lame duck, that unpredictable post-election period when major issues, languished bills and who-knows-what have a last crack at passage by the collection of re-elected, term-limited and ousted members.

Among the thorny items that are expected to come to the fore are legislation to aid expansion of Cobo Hall in Detroit — assuming regional cooperation on a financing scheme — and a ban on smoking in public facilities which is still stymied over hard-edged differences on whether to allow exceptions for Detroit casinos among others.

Also still hanging around are bills giving Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan new authority to enter the individual market and to expand insurance options for its Accident Fund, but little has been done since they were put in a conference committee following approval of separate versions by the Senate and House in June.

New on the radar screen are issues that the Senate and House separately targeted late last week: a phase-out of the Michigan Business Tax surcharge and a constitutional amendment with unclear ramifications that alters how homeowner property taxes are affected by the rise and fall of assessed values.

The MBT surcharge phase-out is the major proposed alteration of the state’s year-old rewrite of how it taxes businesses, but many in the private sector are pushing for other changes as well, notably removing the “tax on a tax” provisions which calculate taxes based in part on gross receipts that include sales taxes and other levies that companies collect and remit to the state.

Those changes would cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s general fund, whose health remains precarious due to continued weak revenue performance. But the Senate would mitigate some of that with another bill capping the state’s new film credit program at $50 million a year.

The House-passed property tax proposal would benefit homeowners in recession periods, when current provisions permit taxable value to continue to rise even when the market is falling. But it also would allow faster growth in taxable value in an up-market than is currently permitted under the constitution. Current provisions keep that value artificially low so that it is no more than the rise in inflation.

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