“Less time and more intense” is how District 48 State Senator John Stinner of Gering described it. He’s also expecting numerous long days, many extending into the evening hours.

In addition to any new legislation, the Legislature will need to follow up on bills that were reworked or didn’t pass in 2019.

One of the major ones is LB 720. The bill would adopt the ImagiNE Nebraska Act to replace the expired Nebraska Advantage Act for economic incentives for businesses.

Stinner, a co-sponsor of the bill, said the state needs to have a broad-based inventive program.

“It’s focused and transparent, which is an improvement of the Nebraska Advantage Act,” he said. “It’s not perfect by any means but we’re kind of in an arms race to attract new business. That bill needs to be re-prioritized to include some language that won’t create a budgetary problem for us down the road.”

Stinner, who comes from the banking industry, said a number of economic incentives, from the LB 840 economic development program to Tax Increment Financing, are commonly used to help finance business startups and expand existing businesses.

District 47 State Senator Steve Erdman of Bayard said he could only imagine how much higher taxes will go to finance LB 720.

“We continue to give away tax incentives for businesses to come here,” he said. “It makes no sense to me because I can’t measure value there that makes a significant difference, but it makes people feel good to have those incentives.”

According to Erdman, a good portion of the state budget is for mandated expenditures. Many other budget items aren’t mandatory.

“The reason we spend more than we should is because we don’t make any priorities,” he said. “Until the Legislature lays some groundwork on what our priorities are, we’ll continue to spend more than we should.”

District 43 State Senator Tom Brewer of Gordon said LB 720 could become a battle. It got first round approval last year because supporters promised to pass a property tax relief bill to get other senators on board.

“We believed them and voted for LB 720,” Brewer said. “The property tax bill got killed after that and the problem needs to be addressed.”

Brewer said the bill doesn’t have much of a chance of passage without a property tax relief component. Senators in opposition want the bill to be rewritten to give some advantages to rural parts of the state.

“Right now, it’s primarily a Lincoln-Omaha economic development bill,” he said. “It’s written for bigger corporations, not for rural Nebraska. Why can’t they write a bill that also helps rural areas? Our population has decreased over the past 10 years so our small businesses could use the help. They tend to stay in the community while a lot of bigger corporations like TD Ameritrade and Conagra take the incentive money and then leave.”

Brewer added the debate could get ugly and LB 720 might be filibustered.

“The Chamber of Commerce thinks they have the votes to push it through even with the filibuster,” he said. “It’s going to be a hard fight on the floor to see what sorts out from that.”

Another big ongoing issue, a sometimes frustrating one, is how to address the state’s property tax situation, one of the heaviest in the nation.

“We had negative revenue that had to be made up during two of the four sessions I’ve been in,” Stinner said. “Even then we’ve been able to take the property tax relief fund up to $275 million. We’re committing $105 million for this biennium and we have the opportunity to add to that incrementally going forward.”

He said it’s not a true story when people and other senators keep saying the Legislature is doing nothing to address the state’s property tax situation.

Erdman said it’s no surprise that property tax reform will be front and center again in the upcoming session.

“We need to fix the property tax problem but the Legislature isn’t willing to do that unless they’re forced to,” he said. “The property tax relief petition should be a driver of that discussion. What we’ve done in the past has been insignificant.”

Erdman added that over the past 20 years, the Legislature has introduced 510 bills dealing with property tax relief, none of which passed.

In addressing property tax, Erdman said he’s working on changes in the way ag land is valued for taxation purposes. Changing from the current market approach to a productivity approach would help eliminate the run-up in ag land values that causes increased property taxes for the state’s ag producers.

Brewer said the Revenue Committee is already working on a new version of a bill to provide property tax relief.

“I think it will result in the standard rural-urban divide,” he said. “The challenge will be finding a middle ground but rural Nebraska hasn’t fared well in the past. That’s the nature of the unicameral.”

He added that senators will try to provide property tax relief in the $100 million range. If that number is trimmed by much, there won’t be the rural support needed for a relief package to pass.

In November, Speaker of the Legislature Jim Scheer proposed an idea for increasing the state’s number of senators from 49 to 55 after the 2020 national census.

“In redistricting now, rural Nebraska will probably lose two senators to the Omaha area and possibly one to Lincoln,” Stinner said. “We only have six senators west of Gothenburg now. By going with 55 senators, it lowers the number of constituents you represent so public meetings aren’t so difficult to schedule. I’ll be interested in seeing how a discussion turns out.”

Brewer said the proposal sounds good in theory. But over time, it only helps Omaha and Lincoln because the population centers are there and representation in the unicameral is based on population.

“We’re already at the point of no return with rural senators being able to control the destiny of the state on anything,” Brewer said. “I think the unicameral is a broken system because it doesn’t allow rural Nebraska to have the voice we need for the taxes we pay.”