Pawlenty slams DFL tax proposals, but indicates all is not lost
A noticeably tan Gov. Tim Pawlenty met with reporters today (April 23) as House and Senate ground away on legislation on their respective floors.
Pawlenty spoke on variety of issues, finding nothing postive to say about the recent tax bills that House and Senate Democrats have put forth.
“This is a very troubling set of proposals,” he said.
Pawlenty depicted Democrats as scouring the Capitol, looking for things to raise taxes on. Pawlenty, as have other Republicans, pointed to a provision in the House tax bill eliminating a tax deduction on organ donation expenses as evidence of a kind of mania.
“Of course,” he answered when asked if he intended to veto a DFL tax increase bill when it reached his desk.
Still, Pawlenty did not portray the gulf between his state budget proposal and the Democrats’ as unbridgeable. Ask about the K-12 funding shift in the House K-12 finance bill — one bigger than the administration’s own — the governor deemed it unwise but not something to slam the door on.
Pawlenty sounded as though he was anything but wed to his proposal to bonding in order to fund for the state budget. He indicated that it wasn’t a sterling idea, and suggested that if Democrats had other ideas, bring them forth.
Indeed, Pawlenty suggest that the budget gulf between the sides was not only bridgeable but not as epic as some may want to believe.
In other matters, Pawlenty viewed the state and state employee unions reaching a contract agreement as something local government and its employees should follow — freeze public employee wages for the next two years, he urged.
Pawlenty viewed the removal of local proporty tax caps, something House and Senate tax bills would do, as a “terribly bad idea.”
As for charges by DFLers that he was unengaged in the legislative process, Pawlenty styled it typical April session chatter.
He has been spending considerable time meeting with House and Senate committee chair people, he said.
Democrats, such as Senate Tax Committee Chairman Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, have suggested that the jumping off point for negotations with the governor is when Pawlenty admits that he, too, is increasing state revenues.
Rather than making the utterance Democrats apparently wait for, Pawlenty said today the claim by DFLers that they were cutting the state budget deeper than he was were invalid.
