By Gene Meyer

Kansas road builders are upset over a proposal in the state House to withhold $351 million from state highway projects in order to helpcut state income-tax rates for families and small businesses.

“There has got to be a better way to reduce personal and corporate income taxes than taking it out of highway construction,” said Brian Hansen, of Dustrol Inc., a major state highway contractor in Towanda.

“Kansas legislators in the last 20 years of highway programs already have ‘borrowed’ more than $1.5 billion, which they’ve never paid back,” Hansen said. “This would decimate our business.”

State Rep. Richard Carlson (R-St. Mary’s) this week introduced a proposed state tax overhaul plan he and other House leaders say addresses problems with a competing plan proposed by Gov. Sam Brownback in January. Carlson is chairman of the House Taxation Committee.

Both plans propose to reduce the income tax rates that most Kansans pay – by as much as 24 percent in some cases – and to hold Kansas government spending growth to no more than 2 percent annually to allow further cuts that will abolish state income taxes eventually.

Brownback’s plan would make permanent a temporary state sales tax increase due to expire this year and wipe out home mortgage and other popular deductions and tax credits to make state tax codes, in his words, simpler, flatter and fairer.

Carlson’s plan keeps the deductions and credits, which cut taxes for lower-income taxpayers instead of raising them slightly as Brownback’s plan, and allows the sales tax increase to expire on schedule.

The reduced sales tax is at the root of the road builders’ anger.

The reduction of what originally was a 1 percentage point sales tax increase – to 6.3 percent – passed in 2010, is scheduled July 1 to drop to 5.7 percent. 

User Comments

• good plain

  "I hope this bill passes hands down. tax reilf is needed in not only Kansas but other states as well"

  Posted by chad Parker on Feb. 22, 2012