Fast-Moving Tax-Cut Bill In Locke’s Hands Governor Cautions Lawmakers That Signing Measure Could Endanger Promised B&O; Tax Cuts

Everyone knows the wheels of government turn slowly, but there are exceptions, and week five of the 1997 Legislature will mark one of them.

The Republican-led Legislature will send Gov. Gary Locke a complicated and controversial measure to make big changes in the way state and local governments collect property taxes. Sponsors say the changes - new limits on rates and assessments - will gradually reduce the average property taxpayer’s bill, ultimately by a few hundred dollars a year.

The House plans to send the bill to Locke today.

The Democratic governor, who last week complained that lawmakers were moving too fast on property-tax cuts, says he doesn’t know if he will sign the measure. When combined with a modest property-tax-cut bill he signed last month, the cost would be about $220 million in the coming two-year budget cycle.

That, Locke says, could threaten other tax breaks, including, he hints, a planned $202 million cut in the business-and-occupation tax. The B&O measure is scheduled to move out of Senate committee on Tuesday.

House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee, and Senate Majority Leader Dan McDonald, R-Bellevue, are proud of the quick action, saying they believe it will forestall a citizen initiative to greatly slash property taxes.

But local government leaders, whose budgets will be affected, have a different take.

“It’s a knee-jerk reaction” that fails to carefully consider impacts on myriad local taxing districts,” Thurston County Commission Chairwoman Diane Oberquell, a conservative, told The Olympian newspaper.

Week five of the 105-day session also finds lawmakers displaying more typical behavior, plodding along on a host of perennial issues. They include overhaul of the juvenile justice and welfare systems, new limits on citizen access to health, abortion, gay rights, and higher education.

As has been the case for years, lawmakers in both chambers are bogged down over how to handle teenage criminals. Bipartisan negotiations stumbled last week after Democrats balked at a GOP plan to charge more minors as adults, with the possibility they would do their time in adult prisons.

The issue still faces its toughest hurdle - lack of money to pay for a new surge of juveniles into the corrections system. Serious work on the state’s $19 billion budget is weeks away.

This week will bring more committee hearings on welfare overhaul, putting off for now the coming clash between the GOP chambers over big differences in their approaches. The Senate’s plan, for example, would include aid for legal immigrants whose benefits were eliminated by Congress last year. The House may not go along with the provision.

A House panel will continue to work on ways to revise health care law to reduce access to health care insurance. The insurance industry wants lawmakers to eliminate a requirement that it allow anybody to sign up for health insurance despite their health histories.

Measures to ban same-sex marriage are working their way through committee and could reach the floor of each house this week or next. Locke opposes the legislation, calling it divisive and unnecessary.