Bush succeeds in establishing agenda again

One thing nobody can take away from Gov. George W. Bush: He sure knows how to set the table.

As Bush approached his first Legislature in 1995, opponents derided his inexperience in dealing with the complexities of lawmaking. The new governor promptly confounded those critics by establishing a four-point agenda - tort reform, welfare reform, education reform and reform of the juvenile justice system - whose passage defined that legislative session.

Having swept the board, Bush could easily have rested on the political capital he had acquired and coasted into a 1998 campaign for re-election if he wanted another term. Instead, Bush announced last year an even more ambitious goal: reducing state property taxes.

When he first brought it up, the wags of the political establishment shook their heads and smiled dismissively. Oh, everybody knew property taxes were too high and getting worse. That wasn't news.

But no one had grabbed that bull by the horns before because of the overwhelming question: How else would we raise enough revenue for public schools?

Can-do attitude

But Bush's straight-ahead, can-do attitude would brook no naysayers. We could cut property taxes, and he'd show one way how. When the Legislature gathered in January, the governor presented a plan to cut property taxes by using $1 billion in surplus funds, raising the state sales tax and adding a new business activity tax.

Moreover, Bush's proposal would shift public school financing from its heavy dependence on property taxes to a formula in which 80 percent of school funds would come from the state and only 20 percent from local property taxes, thus largely eliminating one of the major pitfalls of the entire school financing structure.

The naysayers were stunned, lawmakers got busy, and once again, Bush had succeeded in setting the legislative agenda. A year ago, no one gave property tax relief a ghost of a chance, but the Legislature now stands on the verge of passing a statewide tax restructuring that includes significantly lower property taxes, perhaps as soon as this week.

Lawmakers, naturally, have revamped Bush's original proposal with details of their own. Bush probably expected that and presented his plan as a starting point to show that it could be done. But property tax relief wouldn't have come about without his energy driving it forward.

Not everyone happy

Not everyone, though, will be happy with all the changes. Payers of property taxes are also payers of sales taxes and, directly or indirectly, of business taxes. For most of us, it seems it will be almost impossible to figure out how much we'll end up saving in taxes overall or whether we're saving any at all.

That's because the "state" designated to fund the biggest chunk of our public schools is still us taxpayers, who'll pay in one way or another.

But if we succeed in reducing the role of local property taxes in public school financing and instead distribute the burden for school costs more evenly across the state's population, that alone will be a major accomplishment Bush can take credit for.