Senate strips tax plan, sends blank slate to committee

INDIANAPOLIS -- Republicans who rule the Indiana Senate took their first action Monday on a tax-and-budget plan approved by the Democrat-controlled House by gutting the bill and sending a \"blank slate" to the Senate Finance Committee.\nThe Senate Rules Committee removed tax-increase and tax-restructuring provisions, leaving only language dealing with a study committee and a title change of another committee intact.\n"I say let's continue the discussion but let's give the Senate Finance Committee a blank slate to work with," said Sen. Joseph Zakas, R-Granger.\nProcedurally, the move allowed Senate Republicans to advance the bill without initially voting on any tax-increase provisions. Republicans said it was only considered first by Rules because all legislation that would create committees or commissions must clear that panel.\nSen. Earline Rogers of Gary, one of the outnumbered Democrats on the Rules Committee, said that gutting the bill's substantive provisions was "ludicrous."\n"This kind of discounts all of the work and all of the thought processes that have gone into this legislation in the House," Rogers said.\nBut Senate Finance Chairman Larry Borst, R-Greenwood, said he already had planned to make big changes in the plan.\n"I'm going to use very little of it anyway," he said.\nThe 360-page bill that barely cleared the Democrat-controlled House would increase sales taxes, raise taxes on cigarettes and casinos and suspend two tax cuts approved in 1999.\nSome of the new revenue would be used to close the state budget deficit and some would be used to cut property taxes to protect most homeowners from big tax increases expected from the pending reassessment.\nBorst's committee plans an initial hearing on the issue Thursday, but it will likely be next week before a detailed Senate GOP version of the bill is presented.\nBorst has said the new plan likely will provide more property tax relief for homeowners and more emphasis on restructuring business taxes to promote economic development. The latter could include ways of essentially eliminating the inventory tax and business personal property taxes.\nBut Borst and many Senate Republicans still say tax increases are not needed to shore up the budget deficit, which is projected to top $1 billion by July 2003.\nThat stance concerns Sen. Vi Simpson, D-Bloomington, and House Ways and Means Chairman B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend.\n"I think there are some people who either because of political reasons or because they don't understand how the budget works believe that there isn't really a budget deficit or that we're exaggerating it or inventing one," said Simpson.\nBauer said the real struggle in the Senate "is for them to face the reality of a budget crisis"