House, Senate tax chairs kick off informal negotiations as session's end looms

It wasn’t a conference committee, but it looked a lot like one.

Gathered around the semi-circular table in the center of the Capitol’s ground floor were members of the House and Senate tax committees. Between them sat Revenue Commissioner Paul Marquart, who is customarily at the table when the two groups hash out differences between their omnibus tax bills.

But the House has yet to present such a bill, while the Senate’s has passed out of its taxes committee and awaits floor action. Marquart was clearly seeking to jumpstart the negotiation process by having members of the two chambers lay out where they could find common ground.

Is the House planning to have a tax bill? Sen. Jeremy Miller (R-Winona) asked that early in the meeting.

A House Taxes Committee co-chair, Rep. Aisha Gomez (DFL-Mpls), replied that they hadn’t yet received targets from leadership. But her co-chair, Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston), weighed in on the topic later in the meeting.

“Number one, we have to have a tax bill,” he said. “Number two, we have to save HCMC [Hennepin County Medical Center]. And if we go out of here in 10 days without that, we will have failed the people miserably. And I don’t like to fail.”

It was established that a handful of tax increment financing proposals and 25 of the 32 local option sales tax provisions in the Senate bill were also heard in the House and laid over for possible omnibus bill inclusion.

But the House co-chairs aired their philosophical differences on local option sales taxes.

“In the House Republicans, we’re very big on having referendums,” Davids said of elections required for local approval of such sales taxes. “We’re not going to be able to do a whole lot for the folks who do so much for us, the counties and the cities, as far as [Local Government Aid] or [County Program Aid]. So, if they take it out to the voters and the voters say, ‘We want to do this community center, fire hall, whatever it is,’ why not let the people do that?”

Gomez disagrees with that approach, citing statutes that lay out the requirements for local option sales tax proposals and saying that most of the proposals violate them.

Davids suggested another element he’d like to see in the House tax bill.

“We need to have as much federal conformity as we can afford,” he said. “The Senate doesn’t have a whole lot of federal conformity in their bill.”

Marquart closed the meeting by comparing the meeting to the first U.S. astronaut in space.

“I’m thinking of this meeting as kind of the Alan Shepard flight,” he said. “Finally, we’ll shoot for the moon.”

When the next meeting of the discussion group will occur was left unresolved at meeting’s end.