I can’t say I have a real position on SB 2, but it passed the Senate 34 to 13 and will move to the House. It requires that elected school board members (they’re appointed in some school districts) be elected at a general election. The Republicans seem to like it a lot, and the Democrats seem to dislike it quite a bit. So there must be some angle I don’t know about.

I won’t comment on the merits of the debate because my work has me work with township officials in various ways from time to time. But I don’t think it’s out of bounds for me to observe that township officials are shaping up to become the Official Sacrificial Lamb of the 2007-2008 Property Tax Crisis ™.

Very few people outside of government know what they do. There seem to be an awful lot of them. They’re of local government, and Gov. Daniels keeps saying that local government is to blame. And, damn it, these property taxes hurt. Someone’s gotta pay.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the benefits of eliminating the township positions won’t outweigh the costs. But, I’ve seen precious little identification of the services provided by township officials or numbers setting forth how much money might be saved by shifting their duties to someone else. That’s just not how the discussions have gone.

Dale Moss has a good column on property taxes in the Courier Journal. He adds his voice to the chorus calling for property tax overhaul. But what’s almost unique about his perspective is how forthright he is about his reason for wanting a change. He candidly admits that his property was probably underassessed under the old system. His taxes jumped dramatically under the new system. He’s not sure if he’s being overtaxed under the new system, but he got bit, so he’s jumping – and he wants the property tax overhauled. Under the old assessment system, for example, old but valuable houses were not valued anywhere near their market value.

Anyway, I like how direct his perspective is. No explanation about why the property tax is bad while other taxes are better. No pretending that government is spending dramatically more than it did 10 years ago. Nope. His taxes went up, and he doesn’t like it. No more, no less.

Over the past couple of days I have seen a few references discussing what a particular law maker intends with respect to his or her bill. I just thought I’d drop a brief note reminding folks that the subjective intent of the lawmaker is of no consequence. Only the text of the bill is going to matter when police and prosecutors and courts start trying to enforce these things. And it’s not going to matter if Rep. Q. Public testified in committee that when his bill says “up” he really means “down.”

Most recently, I saw a quote from Sen. Delph with respect to (I presume, the article doesn’t say) SB 335. Among other things, the bill would suspend a business license if the business was cited for three or more violations of hiring illegal aliens.

Bill sponsor Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, repeated his stance that the bill is not about race, ethnicity or nationality.

“It’s about one thing and one thing only, and that’s the respect for the rule of law,” he said.

Well, that’s nice that Sen. Delph did not have race on his mind when he crafted this legislation. But it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. The fact is that the legislation will have a disproportionate impact on Hispanic residents, legal and illegal. Employers will undoubtedly be more cautious about hiring legal immigrants for fear that they’ll come under increased government scrutiny if they employ a lot of Hispanic people. At this point, I’m not trying to make an argument about whether that cost does or doesn’t outweigh the benefit of more strictly enforcing our immigration laws. I’m simply trying to point out that, if Sen. Delph doesn’t realize that this bill is necessarily at least partially about race and ethnicity, he is delusional and the bill does what the bill’s text says, regardless of his belief.

There was a similar incident involving Sen. Drozda with respect to his pharmacist bill that allows the pharmacist more or less unfettered discretion to refuse to fill a prescription based on the pharmacist’s belief that the drug might be used to cause an abortion or suicide. During the committee hearing, Sen. Drozda repeatedly said that the legislation didn’t apply to birth control. But, when pressed by Sen. Simpson to amend the bill to state explicitly that the bill didn’t apply to birth control, Sen. Drozda fought the amendment.

And, last year, while debating the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment, SJR 7, any number of its proponents were adamant that the second section of that proposal wouldn’t do what the text said it would do.

So, to the extent possible, I would urge lawmakers to read the text of the bill and make decisions more on that basis than on the representations by the bill’s author.

At my high school paper, I was the go-to guy for headlines like that. Says a lot about our high school paper, I think. (We got in a lot of trouble for the “Red Devils Cream Trojans; Scalp Indians” about victories against New Castle and Anderson). But, I digress.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article by Niki Kelly entitled Bill to abolish commissioners wins early nod. (See, my title is better.) By a 6 to 4 vote, the Senate Local Government and Elections Committee approved Senate Bill 312. The bill would eliminate the three person Board of County Commissioners that currently serves as the county executive in favor of a one person executive. The county council would be expanded and would serve as the legislative body instead of solely as the fiscal body for the county.

K.D. Benson, a commissioner in Tippecanoe County, testified in support of the bill. She is in her eighth year but chose not to run again.

“I don’t have a horse in this race,” she said, noting the change is the first step in modernizing county government.

Several other county commissioners from around the state spoke against the legislation.

Bill Hahn, of the Indiana Association of County Commissioners, said his organization is not taking a position on whether a three-member commissioners’ board is better than a single executive.

But they do believe individual counties should have the right to choose.

“We oppose the bill not to save our position or because we fear change,” Hahn said. “But because one size doesn’t fit all.”

The Hoosier Pundit has a post up commenting on the logistics of the tax legislation moving through the General Assembly. Basically, he sees a three person struggle – Governor Daniels, Senator Kenley, and Speaker Bauer. He envisions Kenley and Daniels as having egos too big to allow them to work very well together on disagreements despite both being Republicans. Meanwhile, their real enemy looms in the form of the Democratic Speaker, Pat Bauer.

I’ve always seen Sen. Kenley as smarter than he is inflexible (in fact, I haven’t noted any real inflexibility at all — but maybe I wasn’t paying attention) and I’ve seen Gov. Daniels as more inflexible than he is smart. Bauer, having no small ego himself, is definitely more of a legislative gamesman than his Ivy League brethren.

None of these guys is dumb; they all have solid egos; and they all have varying agendas. We’ll see how the average citizen comes out when the giants get finished playing their games.

Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has an article in the Louisville Courier Journal discussing the work legislators did yesterday on tax legislation. She reports that the House of Representatives left The Daniels Tax Plan largely intact.

But they left their mark on the bill with amendments to reduce property-tax savings for those who own more expensive homes, provide income-tax savings to the state’s poorest workers and exempt classroom buildings from a requirement that construction projects be approved by voters.

Also, the House approved amendments to increase an income-tax deduction for renters and freeze property-tax bills at 2008 levels for some who are 65 or older and have homes that are assessed at less than $200,000.

The freeze applies to single homeowners with an income of $35,000 or less or married homeowners with joint income of $50,000 or less.

The amended legislation is structured such that the reduction in property taxes is in full force for homes under $245,000 but diminishes for home values between $245,000 and $800,000.

“This creates fairness,” said the amendment’s author, Rep. Russ Stilwell, D-Boonville. “Your friends and neighbors who pay an extra 1 percent in the sales tax shouldn’t be paying for (the savings of) people who are living in $1 (million) or $2 million homes.”

Republicans opposed the proposal, saying many middle-income Hoosiers own homes with assessments greater than $245,000, particularly if they purchased a property at a lower price and it increased in value.

The Meridian Street tax protesters will not like that. And, in fact, I would suspect that this generally hurts big city property owners more than rural property owners since, I presume, middle class Indy homeowners are much more likely to have $200k+ homes than are rural and small town middle class Hoosiers.