Organization Day brings the first introduced bill of the 2006 legislative session: Introduced Version, House Bill 1001 – Elimination of child welfare levies. According to the synopsis:
Establishes a state funded child welfare relief credit against child welfare levies imposed in a county before 2010 for a: (1) county medical assistance to wards fund; (2) family and children’s fund; (3) children’s psychiatric residential treatment services fund; or (4) children with special health care needs county fund. Permits an additional credit in a tax incentive financing (TIF) area equal to the child welfare relief credit. Beginning in 2010: (1) eliminates authority for a county to impose child welfare levies; (2) specifies that the state will fund the functions that were funded by child welfare levies before 2010; (3) adjusts distributions of financial institution tax, motor vehicle excise tax, and local income tax distributions affected by the elimination of child welfare levies; and (4) establishes procedures to eliminate shortfalls of revenue in TIF areas resulting from the elimination of child welfare levies.
I believe this is part of the House Republicans attempt to mitigate the burdens imposed on local government by the 2005 budget. It is my understanding (possibly uninformed) that these are costs imposed by the state on the counties and paid for by the county through property taxes. It’s only fair that if the State is telling the counties that they have to engage in belt tightening that the State not exacerbate the problem by imposing unfunded mandates on the county government. The only critique I would offer at this point is that the cart was sort of put before the horse. I contend that the State should have removed the mandates before or at the same time it removed the funding. Instead, the State removed the funding in the 2005 budget and is now trying to remove some of the obligations. Better late than never, I suppose.
It will be interesting to see how the legislature proposes to fund the child welfare expenses once it picks up the burden. The tax amnesty receipts have been bandied about as one funding source, though obviously that is not a good solution for funding an ongoing obligation. An increase in the cigarette tax has also been mentioned.
Leave a Reply