Missouri Senate held off $200 million in new taxation

The legislative session just ended was, by far, the most difficult and challenging of the 10 sessions in which I have participated since joining the Senate in 1993. It was also enormously gratifying to work together with lawmakers from both parties to meet the challenges, especially the financial ones, that we faced.

I believe the Senate led all state government and, moreover, believe that we headed off close to $200 million in higher taxes that the House leadership was fighting to lay on Missourians. The record will demonstrate that House Speaker Jim Kreider, D-Nixa, pretty much never met a tax increase he didn't like.

Kreider appointed himself to the all-important House-Senate conference committee that wrote the final version of Senate Bill 1248, which was the principal revenue bill. Over a period of nearly a week the five House and five Senate negotiators met, trying to come up with a final version that would produce some revenue for the state. Over and over and over again, Senate negotiators appointed by this writer flatly rejected the new taxes proposed by their counterparts from the House. Before the tortuous sessions had ended, the House speaker was proposing a nickel tax on every soft drink you buy, arguing that such a levy was needed to discourage youngsters from drinking those awful sodas that are so bad for them. Over breakfast one morning earlier this month, a friend from Kansas City was discussing the negotiations and quipped, of the Kreider soft-drink tax, "Gee, I wonder if Kreider's tax will apply to lemonade stands?"

Nor is this all. Speaker Kreider began the legislative session last January by proposing a monster, one-billion dollar tax-increase package that sent panic-stricken members of his own party running in the opposite direction.

Kreider, a likable, jovial fellow and proven vote getter, is running for the Senate in a Southwest Missouri seat so Republican that even losing Republican candidates running statewide carry it comfortably. The new 20th Senatorial District Kreider seeks to represent rings Springfield, in rural Greene County, and then generally proceeds south and east of that city, Missouri's third largest.

The last several years have seen a spirited debate over Missouri's transportation needs and alleged underfunding. The entire decade of the 1990s was essentially lost as to this issue. While the Carnahan administration was growing most of state government at a rate faster than inflation, it was starving transportation. No major transportation initiative was ever issued from the executive branch in those eight years.

Now, voters will get to hear a debate leading up to a statewide vote of the people on this issue. That vote is scheduled for the August primary on Senate Bill 915, the new transportation funding package. Voters will be asked to adopt the proposal, which includes a half-cent sales-tax increase and a four-cent fuel tax increase, to generate $511 million for our state's transportation needs.

The guess here is that the odds are long against public approval of so large a tax hike. Still, the good part of our system is that the people will make the decision. In many other states, citizens don't enjoy nearly the level of taxpayer protection that we Missourians do. Witness the knock-down, drag-out fight in our neighboring state of Tennessee, over whether that state will adopt an income tax. A popular uprising is under way to stop this, with Tennessee one of the eight states lacking one.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.