Revenue committee finally passes some tax bills

By Phil Noble, Cowboy State Free Press Bureau Chief

CHEYENNE–The legislature’s Joint Interim Revenue Committee spent the day Nov. 18 killing bills, including measures calling for taxes on electric generation, wind energy, property and fuel. At the end of the day, committee co-chairman Rep. Rodney “Pete” Anderson, R-Laramie joked that the committee probably wouldn’t have to meet the rest of the year.

In its second day of hearings on revenue bills, though, the committee passed three bills to be worked on in the legislative session beginning Feb. 10, including bills to establish a Tax Increment Financing vehicle for municipalities, one opening up the property tax assessment process to greater public scrutiny and another to clarify the taxing of digital products.

A fourth bill to begin looking at how to establish a task force made up of legislative and executive branch members to investigate so-called “zero-based” budgeting for state government received support, but was sent to the Legislative Services Office for work and a later vote by mail ballot, a suggestion from Rep. Anderson.

The Tax Increment Financing bill, or TIF for short, was brought to the committee earlier this year by Rep. Tom Lubnau, R-Campbell, but languished because the committee ran out of time to consider it, Rep. Anderson said. It would allow for cities and towns in Wyoming to bond for public improvements in a defined 40 acre-maximum geographic area.

Calling it economic development bill, Wyoming Economic Development Association advocate Lynn Birleffi said “it’s another tool in (economic developers’) toolkits.” She said “it’s an excellent tool that’s used by other states…to get funding.” The mechanism would be especially viable in the future when the credit crunch starts to ease, she noted.

Committee member Rep. Sue Wallis, R-Campbell, said allowing municipalities to “capture the full tax increment (the difference between property values at the beginning of the project and a specified time period later) ignores the fact that you’re going to have to have increased public services for this area, meaning you’ll have to look elsewhere for the money.”

Wyoming Association of Municipalities representative Mark Harris called it an “incentive for development,” and said cities and towns have few options in that area. Joe Evans of the Wyoming County Commissioner’s Association said the bill would allow “one entity to take taxes from another,” referring to the fact that the bill would give all the proceeds from the tax increment to the city or town, not the county in which they are located.

The TIF bill passed the committee by a vote of 8-4.

The proposed bill calling for a look at how to set up a task force to investigate “zero-based” budgeting in the state had good support in comments from committee members, including the two co-chairmen. “There’s a special need for it,” said co-chairman Sen. John Schiffer, R-Sheridan/Johnson.

Bill sponsor Rep. Wallis said, “the idea behind this is that in order to really get a handle on our budget process, we need to get a multi-year look at the process similar to that used by the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group.”