Nebraska senator comments on special legislative session

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (KNOP) - The special legislative session ended last week. The 17-day session was the longest special session in over 60 years.

One of Gov. Jim Pillen’s goals in calling for the session was to lower property taxes in a way that would not affect public schools negatively. Nebraska Sen. Mike Jacobson said the work that the Nebraska Legislature put in to reaching an agreement in a timely manner.

“Since the state is constitutionally responsible for educating every child in Nebraska, it seems right that the state would pick up a larger portion of funding for public schools,” Jacobson said. “That was the goal of the governor. The goal was not to take away local control, and it wouldn’t do that. The local public school boards would continue to run the local schools. The state, however, would probably provide a significantly larger portion of the funding that would effectively lower property taxes.”

However, many voters don’t know the correlation between property taxes and the funds supporting public schools.

“The biggest political subdivision that takes property taxes is the public school,” Jacobson said. “In many cases, the public schools are representing 50% or 60% of your property tax bill. Cities and counties take much smaller bites of the property tax load, but they do take some. Then, you’ve got a number of other political subdivisions that are taking a few million here and a few million there, and, pretty soon, it adds up to a pretty big number.”

Jacobson said they were proud to have accomplished what they did during the session, but he also mentioned that he was disappointed that they couldn’t do more.

“I think the bigger thing that we got accomplished in the special session was that we approved spending caps on cities and counties as far as how much they can increase their property tax ask,” Jacobson said. “I think that Lincoln County, for example, and the city of North Platte haven’t been near those caps to begin with, so they’re going to be unaffected by it. Nonetheless, those caps are in place to help control property tax increases in the future.”

The first session of the 109th Legislature is scheduled to convene Jan. 8, 2025.

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