The Star Democrat: Jacobs reports on busy session
media mentionPosted: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 12:41 pm
By CRAIG O’DONNELL [email protected]
ANNAPOLIS – When the week began, there was just one month left in the General Assembly session.
On Monday, Del. Jay Jacobs, R-36-Kent, summed up the session.
“Looking at what we have to deal with … it’s undoable, almost,” he said. “This week, death penalty repeal comes to the floor. There’s gun control. There’s the (state) operating budget this week. The capital budget is next week.”
Jacobs said, “They told us to expect extremely long floor sessions this week.
“And there are still plenty of bills to be heard, bills to come to the floor. There are 1,526 bills in the House and another 1,200 in the Senate.”
The logjam isn’t simply in the full House of Delegates, but in its committees as well.
Jacobs sits on the Environmental Matters committee. Last Friday, “there was the bottle tax hearing. It was 2 1/2 hours long.”
HB1085 would return Maryland to the days of the nickel deposit on beverage containers. The refundable deposit is not actually a tax.
“The next bill was the 5-cent bag tax. It was a 1-hour meeting,” he said.
The bag bill, HB1086, would add a nickel charge on disposable paper or plastic bags in stores.
Jacobs said he pictures one of two scenarios. Either “there won’t be enough time to debate all of them, or they’ll cut debate short and shove the stuff through.
“It’s monumental, to say the least.”
Most of the session’s heat has been generated by the governor’s death penalty repeal initiative, another bill creating incentives for offshore wind power and an array of bills related to gun safety and permitting.
The offshore wind power bill was back for the third year, Jacobs said, and has passed both houses. “I would imagine the governor is going to sign it,” he said.
The Senate’s death penalty repeal vote was 27-20 in favor, Jacobs said, which puts debate in the House. “I’m not for repeal, personally,” he said.
The floor debate over gun safety will probably involve “a hundred or 200 amendments,” said Jacobs. “It will be a long debate.
“In my opinion, these bills aren’t going to curb any illegal activities, just make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to own firearms for any purpose. It’s not a privilege, it’s a constitutional right.”
In the end, since there are multiple bills which address gun safety, “they’ll probably clump them up.”
He said he expects the Senate’s already-passed version of the firearms safety bill “to get pushed. If the House adopts that, it doesn’t have to go back to committee.”
These days, the General Assembly session would not be complete without wrangling over transportation money.
The account, which supports local revenue-sharing, has been depleted in recent years to balance the budget.
The transportation fund’s problems began nearly a decade ago with the Inter County Connector. In 2005, the General Assembly voted to spend nearly half a billion dollars from the transportation trust fund on the Inter County Connector.
Money which had been borrowed from the transportation fund (and used in the general fund) about a decade ago was not repaid, but diverted to the ICC. According to a fact sheet published by the Sierra Club, $264.9 million was “transferred from the state General Fund to the Transportation Authority for the ICC … These funds were to be (repaid) from the General Fund to the state Transportation Trust Fund.”
Another $180 million from the Transportation Trust Fund was earmarked specifically for the ICC. When the economy fell flat, state tax revenue from all sources began to dry up and the transportation fund tank fell to empty.
The newly proposed transportation funding plan would do two things: first, scale back the existing pay-at-the-pump tax to 18.5 cents, but index it to inflation for future years.
Jacobs said, “The gasoline tax scares me with the unknown potential. They won’t have to come back to the legislature anymore.
“I don’t like it at all. In a few years we could have a 50-cents-a-gallon tax, the way they’re indexing it.
“It’s 2 cents the first year, then 7 more cents, and they could go on adding 7 cents year after year.”
The state has extracted about a billion dollars from the transportation trust fund in recent years, Jacobs said. That leaves towns and counties without their share of revenues for road repair, and it leaves the state without enough money for large mass-transit projects which are already on the books.
“It’s time to start paying back the transportation trust fund. They owe it $1 billion,” said Jacobs. “Street and bridge work is going to suffer all over the state.”
He said the spending priorities are wrong. “There’s 80 percent of the budget wrapped up in mass transit, versus 8 percent in the state who use mass transit. Despite all the spending mass transit use has gone up in recent years a tenth of a percent.”
It also would add sales tax, rising to four percent, to gasoline’s price at wholesale.
The prospect of an extra 9 or 10 cents per gallon in July 2014 has drawn protests and criticism. But according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, if the goal is to set the tax at 1992’s level of purchasing power, the existing flat tax must be increased 16 cents a gallon – to almost 40 cents – to account for 21 years of inflation.
If the gas tax is adjusted for inflation (adjusting to 2012 dollars) over the entire 91 years Maryland has had one, ITEP’s website states, then the new proposal will result in the lowest tax rate since 1923.