101st legislative session starts Jan. 13

Greetings. The 101st legislative session starts Tuesday, Jan. 13 at noon. At that time, the governor gives his address to the entire legislature in the House chamber. Why? Because we have the biggest room. The Senate is tiny, and it would make no sense trying to cram 70 House members and the 35 senators into a 35-desk setting. If you want to find me, I’m in the third row to the left of the podium. There is a row of single desks and I’m the first double desk. Rep. Heather Baxter from Rapid City is my seat mate. Matt Roby is in the single row to my left. He’s from Watertown and I graduated from high school with his uncle, Dave Roby.

So, as promised, some of the proposed legislation. Here’s what I’m carrying so far. We’ll need to have a couple of caucus meetings to see how things will shake out. These are proposed bills with tentative bill numbers. The first week actual bill numbers will be assigned. Remember House bills have three numbers with HB in front and Senate bills have two numbers with SB in front, such as HB111 or SB24.

HB111—“Establish the price of new or used motor vehicles acquired by gift or other transfer.” This requires the county treasurer to tax off of the bill of sale, not a new invoice, or in used vehicles, using Kelley Blue Book figures.

HB258—“Form a task force on zebra mussels and lake surface water, make an appropriation and declare an emergency.” Lake Sheridan, Pactola and 32 other lakes have zebra mussels and not much is being done. So we’re proposing a task force to look at what neighboring states are doing to combat this invasive species.

HB449—“Require alternate instruction students to take standardized tests and submit notice annually.” Currently, no testing is required for home school students.

HB678—“Eliminate taxes on owner occupied single family dwellings, increase gross receipts and use tax rates.” I’ll explain this one as more develops. Most important residential owner occupied homes. I ran on property tax relief and was the only legislator to force a floor vote on HB1016 last year. The vote count was 35 yea and 34 nay, one absent. We need 47 yea votes. An interesting point is I went before the property tax summer study and proposed HB1016 as their bill to recommend to the legislature. What do you think happened? You got it. It wasn’t on the 19 proposed property tax bills. Probably because members of the committee from the House were nay votes. None of the 35 yea vote legislators got selected for the committee.

One of the 19 property tax proposals was to cut state government spending by five percent. Great. How is that going to help the homeowners who are getting taxed out of their homes? I agree with the governor that he didn’t like any of the 19 proposals from the property tax summer study. He, the governor, has his own tax bill where it is proposed to give the county authority to raise a 1/2 percent sales tax if they so desire. Again, no direct help to the “owner occupied” persons who are being taxed out of their homes. Increased income to counties should help in not raising your assessments, but the jury is still out on this proposal.

My bill from last year would drop an owner occupied residential home $417 per $100,000 assessment, so a $500,000 assessed home would be reduced by $2,085.00. A $300,000 assessment would be reduced by $417x3=$1,251.00.

My last point is Return On Investment. If a majority of us get this tax reduction, we spend the money and our state sales tax would be 5¢, same as North Dakota. This would result in our state treasury bursting at the seams!

So, what about the poor people with the raise of 4.2¢ to 5¢? That’s 3¢ on a $4 loaf of bread and the poor people who are on “food stamps”/EBT cards/SNAP or whatever we call it, get their groceries for free. Until next week, feel free to contact me at tim.goodwin@sdlegislature.gov . My cell is 605-390-5324, but please go easy on phone calls. I’d prefer a text because I can read that any time.