Back in January I introduced LB 1169, which was a bill to turn the Nebraska State Historical Society into a state code agency. The Nebraska State Historical Society had drifted far away from its original purpose and was engaging in practices which lacked accountability, especially in regards to the institution’s finances. Turning them into a state code agency allowed the Governor to appoint the director and greatly increased their level of accountability.

I made LB 1169 my personal priority bill this year and it passed in the Legislature. After the Governor signed the bill into law on April 16, 2024, the search began for a new executive interim director to run the agency. The natural and obvious choice for the position was Cindy Drake. Drake was the former librarian for the Nebraska State Historical Society, who had been unjustly fired from her position after serving the institution for 45 years. Gov. Pillen appointed Drake to the position on July 24, saying that she was the right person to fill the role.

Cindy Drake has already done a remarkable job of cleaning up the agency in the two short months that she has served as the executive interim director. Besides changing the name of the agency back to its original name (the name had been changed to History Nebraska), Drake has made several other positive changes to the agency and today I would like to highlight what some of those changes are.

First, Drake has been working closely with the Nebraska Department of Administrative Services and the Budget Office to restore financial accountability to the Nebraska State Historical Society. Drake is greatly improving the efficiency and accountability of the agency’s use of taxpayer’s dollars. For example, the agency is now relying upon its own staff to prepare the history of Nebraska instead of using out-of-state consulting firms to do the work. In short, those employed by the agency are now doing what they were originally hired to do.

Drake is leading the agency to restore its main exhibits in the Nebraska History Museum, which is located in Lincoln. These exhibits tell the comprehensive history of Nebraska from ancient times up to the 20th Century, and include important historical sites in Western Nebraska such as Fort Robinson and Chimney Rock. One of Drake’s goals is to create more interaction between the agency and local residents to better tell the story and to better promote the history of these important historical sites.

Drake has been leading the Nebraska State Historical Society to renew its partnership with the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, which has been in existence for the past 82 years. In 2023 the former director of History Nebraska, Trevor Jones, had been charged with felony theft by deception for transferring $269,926 to the History Nebraska Foundation, a separate foundation which he had helped to create. Under Drake’s leadership the Nebraska State Historical Society will work in tandem with the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation to better fund and work on mutual historical activities which will better serve residents throughout the whole State of Nebraska.

Finally, Drake has restored the visiting hours for the library. The library is the home for the Archives Research Room, which houses the largest collection of Nebraska historical research materials. Previously, the library had been open to the public only one day each week. Now, the library, which is located at 1500 R Street in Lincoln, will be open weekdays from 9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., except on Tuesdays.

As you can see, there are many positive changes that are now occurring at the Nebraska State Historical Society. These improvements are happening because of LB 1169. Cindy Drake is doing an excellent job restoring accountability, integrity, and faith in our state’s most important institution for preserving our heritage and history.

Last week, Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha, sent a letter to Sen. Ray Aguilar, chair of the Legislature’s Executive Board, asking State Senators to rethink the legality and constitutionality of LB574, otherwise known as the “Let Them Grow Act”. LB574 put restrictions on physicians administering gender altering drugs and procedures on individuals under the age of 19. LB574 narrowly passed in the Legislature, and Sen. Cavanaugh had filibustered every bill leading up to the final vote on LB574 in order to stall its passage.

Sen. Cavanaugh’s letter to the Executive Board is designed to press the issue of how many sexes actually exist and to force the State Legislature to grapple with the issue of legalizing gender rights. For example, she cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964, appealed to the Bill of Rights contained in the Nebraska State Constitution, especially Article I, Section 3 which protects any person from being deprived of their right to liberty, and the Declaration of Independence which guarantees to every citizen the right to pursue happiness.

One of the fundamental problems with Sen. Cavanaugh’s mission to protect gender rights is that it is based upon very recent and flimsy science. While it is not my intention today to argue for the science of a two sex only human anatomy, it is my intention to challenge Sen. Cavanaugh’s progressive scientific worldview. For example, earlier this summer, the American College of Pediatricians released a declaration which calls upon those in medical profession to “follow the science” and to “immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.” Their statement is important because it shows that there simply is no consensus in the medical field regarding these kinds of treatments for children.

Medical science sometimes advances faster than ethics. As Dr. Ian Malcom once said about the scientists who were creating dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park, they “…were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Dr. Malcom’s word of caution rings just as true for humans as it is for dinosaurs. Performing gender altering procedures on minors is just as much a moral decision as it is a scientific one.

In her letter to the Executive Board, Sen. Cavanaugh referred to these gender altering procedures as “necessary healthcare” without any qualification. To be sure, gender altering procedures are not necessary for sustaining life, and non-life-threatening healthcare procedures have never been considered a fundamental human right in American jurisprudence. At best, gender altering procedures would fall under the category of elective procedures, and elective procedures do not qualify as basic rights. If elective procedures were to constitute a necessary healthcare right, then what would that imply about such things as breast augmentations, liposuction, and nose jobs for underage straight individuals?

The fact of the matter is that many laws are created and are enforced which restrict what people can do to their own bodies. For example, the State of Nebraska has laws on the books which prohibit suicide, drunk driving, and public nudity, just to name a few. We prohibit such activities despite the fact that the argument is sometimes made on a purely personal level that suicide, drunk driving, and public nudity might contribute to an individual’s personal pursuit of happiness. We prohibit these kinds of activities because they can potentially do irreparable harm to the individual and that they transgress what is good for society as a whole.

So, I submit that making gender altering procedures available to minors is not good for Nebraska. Legalizing gender altering procedures for minors is immoral because minors are not yet mature enough to make these kinds of irreparable, life-changing decisions for themselves and that allowing minors to make these kinds of irreversible decisions transgresses what is good for society as a whole.

Last Thursday an Interim Study was conducted at the Capitol in Lincoln on LR357. According to Sen. Rick Holdcroft of Bellevue, the sponsor of the legislation, the purpose of the study was “to determine to what extent, if any, there is a necessity to bolster election security in the State of Nebraska.” To be sure, Nebraskans need to have confidence that their elections are secure and that the vote counting process accurately reflects the will of the people.

The two recent assassination attempts on the life of former president, Donald J. Trump, have settled the question once and for all as to whether individuals exist who are trying to interfere in our elections. Taking the life of a presidential candidate represents the most extreme form of election interference, and anyone who is so brazen to overtly attempt the assassination of the former president of the United States certainly does not lack the audacity to try to interfere covertly with the results of an election or to tamper with our vote counting machines.

The Interim Study focused on several potential problems with election security. The first problem arose during the days of the coronavirus outbreak. COVID-19 affected the elections of 2020 and 2022 by significantly increasing the number of early voting and mail-in ballots across the State. More than 50 percent of voters in Douglas County, for example, now vote early or by mail. The increase of early voting and voting by mail has increased the potential for voter fraud by illegally stuffing the ballot box.

Voting with a photo ID is also troublesome. Ever since voters passed Initiative 432 in 2022, which requires voters to show a photo ID when voting, validating mail-in ballots and ballots placed in drop boxes has become an issue. While state law currently requires voters to show a photo ID when they register to vote and to record their driver’s license number on their early voting or mail-in ballot, this process skirts the requirement to show a photo ID at the actual time of voting and opens the door for anyone who illicitly obtains driver’s license numbers to cast mail-in ballots for other registered voters.

Another problem relates to the advancement of election software and tabulating machines. For example, a skilled hacker might want to cheat in the election by changing the data contained in voter rolls stored by the software and counted in the tabulating machines. Because this data eventually gets stored onto a military grade thumb drive before it gets sent to the Nebraska Secretary of State to be certified, the possibility for interference exists at this point in the process. For example, a fraudster would merely have to replace the military grade thumb drive with one of his own in order to change the outcome of an election.

Finally, the potential for election fraud exists with the ballot counting machines themselves. While the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) ballot counting machines used in Nebraska never come with modems already installed, the worry is that one could be secretly installed shortly before an election, giving online access to nefarious groups or even to foreign agents. Because the ES&S contract forbids the Nebraska Secretary of State from opening up the machines and inspecting them for himself without authorized personnel being present from ES&S, this has caused suspicion about the use of such ballot counting machines. However, both Wayne Bena, the Assistant Secretary of State, and Chris Wlaschin of ES&S, agreed at the public hearing that such an inspection could be arranged.

I share these things with you today, not to cause anxiety about our elections, but to show you how the Legislature has been taking positive steps forward to protect the integrity of our elections. Last year I had introduced two bills that would have solved these problems, LB 228 and LB230, but neither bill advanced out of the Government, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. When it comes to elections, the time to act is before we have a problem.

This week I want to continue my explanation of LB 34 and what it means to you as a property tax payer. Three lawmakers, Sen. Steve Halloran (LD33), Sen. Justin Wayne (LD13), and myself did a press release last week, alerting members of the public to the fact that taxpayers will not be able to claim their property tax credit for their 2023 property taxes paid. That press release got the attention of the members of the Legislature’s Revenue Committee and the Nebraska Department of Revenue, who are now trying to protect the State’s so-called money. Therefore, I will explain exactly what LB34 will do to taxpayers who paid their property taxes for 2023 in the calendar year of 2024.

To start, let’s assume for the moment that your tax credit for the property taxes you paid in 2023 amounts to $1000. In that case, the property tax credit that you would ordinarily claim on your 2024 income tax return would be $1,000. Because you would file that income tax return at the end of the two-year cycle, which occurs in the year 2025, you then should be eligible to receive a total credit of $2000 – That is, $1,000 for your 2023 taxes and another $1000 for your 2024 taxes.

So, what’s the problem? After the passage of LB 34, you will no longer be able to collect the $1000 credit for your 2023 property taxes. Instead, you will now get a $1000 credit that you won’t have to file to collect on your income taxes for your 2024 property taxes. After the two-year property tax cycle, under LB 34, you will have received only a $1000 total credit. You will never see the $1,000 credit owed to you for your 2023 property taxes. It’s now gone. It has disappeared into thin air.

The language of LB 34 means that you have forever lost the opportunity to collect the credit of $1000 owed to you for your 2023 property taxes. Therefore, you have personally funded your own property tax relief for 2024 with the credit you should have received for your 2023 property taxes.

The Governor’s Office, the Nebraska Department of Revenue, and the Legislature’s Revenue Committee want you to believe that you are being held harmless because you will be receiving a $1000 credit frontloaded for your 24 taxes, but nothing could be further from the truth. As you see from this example, you have lost the $1,000 that you should have received for your 2023 property taxes. In other words, this is a retroactive property tax increase for the property taxes you paid for 2023.

It is now known that the members of the Legislature’s Revenue Committee, the Legislature’s Budget Office, and several other State Senators knew this before the vote was ever taken on LB 34. They knew beforehand that the bill was going to remove your opportunity to collect your credit for your 2023 property taxes. Now they are spending a significant amount of time trying to convince you that you did not lose anything simply because you will receive a nice credit on your 24 property taxes. it is quite obvious now that the old saying rings true that “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

Over the past four years, those who have been eligible to claim their property tax credit but who never did so, constitute a significant percentage of the population of the state. 45 percent of the money that was appropriated for the credit was never claimed because, for whatever reason, those taxpayers never filed the necessary paperwork to get the credit. That total amount is just over $700 million. If those people would have filed for the credit, the state would’ve had to give away that $700 million in the form of credits to those taxpayers, so the State’s revenue has increased over the last four years by $700 million because those people never claimed their credits. So, the question now must be asked: Who does the money belong to? You guessed it. It’s the people’s money. The State of Nebraska does not really have any money, because everything it has comes from the taxpayer.

Another issue that LB 34 has created for those who pay quarterly estimates on their income taxes is that they may find themselves short.  This is so because they have been paying their estimates considering the reduction by the credits of the property taxes that went to the schools in the past years.  The good news is that the Revenue Department said they will not fine people for under-funding their payments.

Please contact the Governor’s Office and your State Senator and tell them that they must fix this issue before we all file our income taxes next spring.

As you may recall, I have written about the not-so-special legislative session in some of my recent articles. For the past week I have been researching the implementation of LB 34, the so-called property tax relief bill that was passed during the special session of the Legislature in August. As I have read and reread that legislation, it has become apparent to me that the legislature, including me, missed an important piece about how that bill would be implemented.

The special session started with the Governor’s proposal, which was LB1. I spent the better part of a day reading the 144 pages of that bill, making notes, and jotting down questions that I had about it. My work turned out to be a waste of time because before LB1 advanced to the floor it was changed with a completely new bill, LB9.

My staff and I were busy trying to understand the ramifications of LB9, which was 120 pages long, when it was suddenly withdrawn and replaced with yet another bill, LB34. LB 34 became the bill that would finally pass in the Legislature and make your property tax relief dollars go directly to the schools, so you would not have to claim the 30 percent credit any more on your income tax return.

When LB 34 was being debated on the floor of the Legislature, I failed to catch some very important language in the bill, which removed the opportunity for taxpayers to collect their 30 percent property tax rebate for the taxes they paid to the public schools for the year 2023. According to the language of the bill, property tax credits will no longer be available as of January 1, 2024.

Whether property owners paid their 2023 property taxes personally or through their escrow accounts in 2024, does not matter, because neither one will be able to collect the 30 percent property tax credit allotted to them for the year 2023.

The loss of those property tax credits will result in the State retaining the credit in the State’s general fund. Last year those property tax credits added up to $565 million. The State of Nebraska will now keep those property tax credits from 2023 and use that $565 million to fund the reduction in property taxes planned for 2024. So, those paying property taxes are funding their property tax relief for 2024 with their lost credit from 2023.

When I inquired about how the State of Nebraska intends to make up for these lost property tax credits from 2023, the response I received was not very convincing. The State wants the public to believe that the reduction in property taxes that will take place next year for the tax year of 2024 somehow makes up for the loss of the property tax credit that taxpayers were denied for their 2023 property taxes.

I spent several hours with the budget office trying to explain to them how the property tax credit for 2023 will be forever lost. They were not convinced. Because the State plans to keep the $565 million owed to the taxpayers from their 2023 property taxes, the taxpayers, unbeknownst to them, will be funding their own property tax reduction for 2024.

I regret that I did not catch this mistake before LB34 was passed in the Legislature during the special session. Nevertheless, when you file your income taxes next spring, be prepared, because you will not be able to claim the same 30 percent property tax credit that you have received in the past. So, your taxes for 2023 will be much higher than they were in 2022.

Removing the tax credit for 2023 amounts to a retroactive property tax increase. The State is increasing each person’s taxes in 2023 in order to give them a property tax decrease in 2024. There are only two ways to make the taxpayer whole again: The State could allow each taxpayer to claim the credit for their 2023 property taxes when they file their income tax return in 2025, or the State could double the discount in property taxes for 2024 to make up for the credit loss in 2023.

The goal of the not-so-special session was supposed to be about increasing property tax relief, not taking property tax relief away from those who were already getting it and giving it to those who weren’t.

Because the Nebraska State Legislature failed to pass any kind of meaningful and significant property tax relief during the special session, and because Nebraska now ranks as the second worst state in the nation for mortgage delinquencies, today I would like to inform the public about a significant development in the courts which now affects those with delinquent property tax liens.

According to Nebraska State Statute 77-1801, the properties of those with delinquent property tax bills can be sold or auctioned off to the highest bidder every year on the first Monday in March after the taxes become delinquent. Once the properties are sold and the back taxes are paid, the new owner of the property gets to keep the remainder of the equity in the home. Some have called this home equity theft and it has become a nightmare scenario for many elderly residents, the sick, and those who lose a job.

Such was the case for Kevin L. Fair of Scotts Bluff County. When Kevin’s wife, Sandra Nieveen, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, her condition required round-the-clock care. The Fairs couldn’t afford to hire anyone, so Kevin chose to quit his job and become his wife’s primary caregiver. The couple now had to live solely off of their Social Security checks. However, when their property tax statement came in, Kevin could not find a way to pay the $588 he owed to the County of Scotts Bluff.

In 2015 Continental Resources purchased the Fair’s tax debt and satisfied the tax debt to the county. Then, in 2018 the company sent Kevin a bill totaling $5,268 in overdue taxes, penalties, interest, and fees along with a notice to settle the debt within 90 days, otherwise, their $60,000 house would be sold to pay the debt. Naturally, Kevin couldn’t pay such an exorbitant amount of money, so he took it to court, where he lost in both the state court and in the Nebraska Supreme Court in 2022.

A similar situation had happened to Geraldine Tyler, who lived in Hennepin County, Minnesota. After her tax debt was sold, the tab on her original $2,300 tax statement ballooned to $15,000 after adding penalties, interest, and fees. However, when she sued Hennepin County, her case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled in her favor last year.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment applies to these kinds of cases. Specifically, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The nation’s highest court ruled that Hennepin County “could not use the toehold of the tax debt to confiscate more property than was due.” Commenting on the case, Chief Justice, John Roberts said, “The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.” This decision is good news for homeowners who are struggling to pay their property taxes.

The U.S. Supreme Court directed those states with similar cases to revisit them. So, the Nebraska Supreme Court had to revisit and reverse their decision in the case of Continental Resources v. Kevin L. Fair. This time the Nebraska Supreme Court decided that Kevin Fair was entitled to the excess equity in his home; otherwise, the decision would constitute a violation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

I share this information with you today because I expect the property tax situation in Nebraska to grow much worse before it ever gets any better. Nebraskans need to know how to protect themselves against home equity theft, especially when the government allows it. No one ever has the right to take the excess equity that you have put into your home.

The not-so-special-session of the Legislature ended on Tuesday, August 20. Sen. Loren Lippincott of Central City described the mood of the session by writing: “Unfortunately, the biggest scarcity seems to be the political courage to do what is right on behalf of the people.” Sen. Lippincott’s statement profoundly described exactly what happened during the special session of the Legislature, which ended without passing any kind of meaningful or significant property tax relief.

What the Legislature passed was not very original or new. It took 17 days for the Legislature to adopt a resolution which I had previously introduced as an amendment to another bill back in April. The reason I introduced that amendment was to help those who were not claiming their property tax credit on their income tax return. Back in April my amendment had received 23 votes, but it needed 25 to pass. Four months later and after 17 days of the most unorganized and confusing session I have ever been involved in, we passed the same amendment with 40 votes.

I knew back in April that passing that amendment would not stop property taxes from increasing. What the Legislature passed during the special session through LB34 amounts to nothing more than a slight decrease in the amount of the increase that taxpayers will see on their future property tax statements. While the amendment will help the 45 percent of property owners who have not been filing the necessary paperwork to get the property tax credit on their income tax returns, the credit itself has been available ever since LB1107 passed back in the year 2020, so it does not really count as property tax relief.

In addition to front loading the property tax credit already made available to the taxpayers since 2020, LB34 also placed a cap on local units of government. The cap applies to their budgets. The cap will restrict increases to zero or the inflation rate, whichever is higher; however, the cap may be overridden whenever there is a threat to public safety or by a vote of the people during the month of May in odd numbered years.

One issue that a lot of people don’t understand is how their property taxes pay for many requirements that the State has placed on local units of government. From time to time the State Legislature passes bills that force counties, cities, and schools to pay for things that the state does not pay for. These kinds of bills are called “unfunded mandates”. Unfunded mandates cost property owners hundreds of millions of dollars every year in the form of higher property taxes. Unfortunately, State Senators often do not take into consideration how these unfunded mandates will affect the taxpayers when it comes time to vote on the bill.

I was part of the working group that the Governor selected to work on property tax relief earlier this year. That group met seven times during the early summer months. It has been said that this committee almost unanimously agreed with the plan that the Governor introduced. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was never a time when a vote was taken, nor were the members of the working group ever asked if they agreed with the plan. There was no method for determining any kind of consensus. What the Governor came up with was his own personal plan. The Governor had been advised not to call for a special session until he had 33 votes to pass his plan in the Legislature. He ignored that advice and has now discovered the hard way that there are three separate coequal branches of government.

The Governor has the authority to call for a special session of the Legislature, but he has no authority to keep State Senators there. Earlier this spring the Governor had stated that he would continue to call for special sessions, even if it took until Christmas to get meaningful property tax relief. Now he is saying that unless he has the votes, he won’t call the State Senators back to the Capitol. Gov. Pillen stated many times that his goal was to deliver a 50 percent reduction in property taxes. The bill passed by the Legislature is only a three percent reduction and now he is calling that a great first step. In the final analysis, what the Legislature passed amounts to nothing more than a decrease in the amount of the increase.

As I write this article it is the 14th day of the Unicameral Legislature’s special session for property tax relief and it is still ongoing. 81 bills have been introduced during the special session to deal with taxes while 24 resolutions have been introduced to change the Nebraska State Constitution. Each one of these bills and resolutions has had a public hearing.

Most of these bills were referenced to the Legislature’s Revenue Committee. So, the members of the Revenue Committee combined several ideas from these bills into the Governor’s bill and advanced LB1 to the floor for debate. That bill was 144 pages long, and it did not have enough support to advance to the next round of debate on Select File. So, the members of the Revenue Committee went back to work over the weekend.

On Monday, August 12, the Revenue Committee amended their new plan into a bill by Sen. Jana Hughes of Seward. After several hours of debate on the floor LB9 also failed to garner enough support to advance to the next round of debate.

Finally, the Revenue Committee decided to scale back their proposal by amending yet another bill. This time they decided to amend their ideas into Sen. Tom Brewer’s bill, LB34. The strategy of amending a different bill enabled to Revenue Committee to avoid debating deleterious motions which had already been filed on previous bills.

The amendment to LB34 made two important changes. First, it front-loaded the property tax credit which had already been made available to taxpayers back in 2020 under LB1107. That bill had already allowed property owners to reclaim 30 percent of their property tax statement as a credit or refund on their state income tax return. However, many people were not claiming the credit because they did not know about it or they had difficulty filing the necessary paperwork. Once LB34 passes into law that tax credit will be automatically deducted from each property tax statement, eliminating the need for taxpayers to file the paperwork. Doing it this way makes much better sense for taxpayers who otherwise would have to pay their outrageous property tax bills and then wait six months for a refund.

Second, the bill places spending caps on the political subdivisions of the state. The Property Tax Growth Limitation Act contained in an amendment to the bill limits the levying authority of political subdivisions by capping any increases by zero or the inflation rate. Another amendment that was adopted into the bill allows a political subdivision to override the cap by holding a special election of the people during an odd numbered year in the month of May.

What is ironic to me is that I had introduced an amendment with these same ideas during the regular session of the Legislature earlier this year, but the Legislature failed to adopt it. At that time my amendment only had support from 23 State Senators, so it failed by only two votes. Had we adopted my amendment, the special session of the Legislature would not have been needed.

The bottom line is that while LB34 contains some good ideas, it will not deliver the kind of property tax relief that Nebraskans really need. The end result is that property taxes will continue to go up and LB34 will only give taxpayers a slight decrease in the amount that their property taxes will go up next year.

The EPIC Option Consumption Tax remains the best solution for Nebraska’s broken tax system, but it will be up to the people to put the measure on the ballot for the year 2026.

The Governor’s new property tax relief plan for the special session is in deep trouble. Last Thursday the Legislature voted to adjourn until Monday, August 12, in order to fix several problems in the bill and to garner more support for it. LB9 along with AM51 is getting tossed about like a wave of the sea without enough votes to get it passed. It is not my intention today to sink the Governor’s property tax relief bill; instead, I want to save it. Last Thursday I offered Nebraska State Senators a way to fix the Governor’s tax plan in order to make it work for Nebraska. Today I would like to share the three most important changes for fixing the Governor’s new tax plan.

The first item in the Governor’s new tax plan which needs to be fixed is the part which places a two percent excise tax on new agricultural and manufacturing equipment. Whereas the EPIC Option Consumption Tax would never tax business-to-business transactions, including agricultural and manufacturing equipment, the Governor’s plan does just that. It is always a mistake to tax necessary manufacturing and agricultural equipment.

Taxing agricultural equipment encourages farmers and ranchers to purchase their equipment in other states where taxes are cheaper. We call this phenomenon “border bleed”. Dealers located near border states with cheaper taxes on agricultural equipment would especially suffer from a loss of income as farmers and ranchers pass them by on the highway to purchase their equipment in other states.

The second item in the Governor’s new tax plan which needs to be fixed is the Tax Equity & Educational Opportunities Support Act (TEEOSA). TEEOSA is the program which provides state aid to public schools. Now is the best time to reform TEEOSA because the Legislature is working on major tax reform legislation and because several school districts will soon lose a portion of their state aid, which will result in significant increases in future property taxes. For example, in Fiscal Year 2024 the Bayard Public Schools, where I live, is set to lose $427,947 in state aid, while the Morrill Public schools will lose $587,030, and the Sidney Public Schools will lose $465,167. The last thing folks living in these school districts need is another increase in their property taxes and that is precisely what will happen if the Legislature does not fix TEEOSA now.

Nebraska needs to replace TEEOSA with a new program that would benefit all school districts across the State. The EPIC Option Consumption Tax bill (LB16) that I introduced for the special session already contains a comprehensive plan for replacing TEEOSA. I worked with three school district superintendents to create a new replacement plan for TEEOSA with simplified formulas that would benefit all school districts across the State. The Governor could fix TEEOSA simply by utilizing the plan already outlined in LB16.

The third item that needs to be fixed in the Governor’s new tax plan is to end our state’s dependence upon property taxes and income taxes. As the Creighton University economist, Ernie Goss, said when he testified before the Revenue Committee on the Governor’s new tax plan, “Sales taxes are the least regressive form of taxation.” Moreover, as the U.S. economy continues to transition towards a service economy, as opposed to a manufacturing economy, it will become increasingly more important and inevitable for states to begin taxing consumable services, and not just consumable goods.

Therefore, Last Thursday I suggested that we begin implementing the EPIC Option plan with the goal of taking the state income tax rate down to zero and the property tax rate also down to zero. By setting these rates at zero, the Legislature could avoid having to amend the State Constitution and these taxes could be reinstated by a vote of the people at any time in the future should the State ever experience a significant revenue shortfall.

On July 30 a public hearing was held at the State Capitol in Lincoln on LB 16. LB 16 is the latest and most updated version of the EPIC Option Consumption Tax, which I introduced for the special session of the Legislature. According to the Governor’s proclamation only bills which focus on property tax relief may be considered for the special session.

The public hearing was outstanding for the EPIC Option Consumption Tax. One member of the Revenue Committee commented afterwards that nearly 100 private citizens had come out to testify in favor of the EPIC Option Consumption Tax, while only two paid lobbyists bothered to show up in person to testify in opposition to it.

The online comments that were submitted on LB 16 had similar results. There were 85 proponents of the EPIC Option Consumption Tax compared to only nine opponents.

I am overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of support that the EPIC Option Consumption Tax received from the public at the hearing. Some concerned citizens drove as much as eight hours to testify for only three minutes before the members of the Legislature’s Revenue Committee. By both big numbers and by telling their own personal stories, these citizens made a huge impact on the committee members. No one could have sat through that hearing without being moved by the stories of taxpayers who were struggling to pay their property taxes.

One particular woman who testified in person at the hearing struggled to hold back her tears as she told her own personal story of how she had to make the very difficult decision to sell the family ranch. The ranch had been homesteaded by her grandfather and willed to her by her father back in 1994. However, by 2011 she could no longer afford to pay the property taxes and had to sell it.

Another woman who submitted an online testimony wrote about how she and her husband pay more in property taxes each year on their farmland than what they originally paid for the land back in 1989.

A landlord, whose property taxes have doubled within past ten years, testified online about how Nebraska’s property tax system is forcing him to evict seniors who live on a fixed income. He wrote, “It breaks my heart when a fixed income renter has to move out because they can’t afford to pay rent anymore.”

Without these kinds of pertinent testimonies, State Senators in Lincoln and Omaha would have little idea about the severity of the burden of our property tax system and the predicament that it is putting property owners in. More and more Nebraskans are finding themselves in the difficult position of having to decide whether or not they can afford to continue living in Nebraska.

Something has to be done immediately to stop the bleeding from our overburdening property tax system. On July 23 the National Mortgage News published a report of states where mortgage delinquencies are increasing the most. Nebraska now ranks at number two. The only state where mortgage delinquencies are rising at a faster pace than Nebraska is the state of Vermont. Moreover, the USDA continues to rank Nebraska as the third highest state for farm and ranch bankruptcies.

State Senators at the Capitol in Lincoln are finally getting the message that real tax reform is needed in Nebraska. It is my sincere hope and desire that the Unicameral Legislature will be able to pass legislation that will result in meaningful and significant property tax relief.