Another week, another busy hearing schedule for the team at OpenSky Policy Institute. Hearings will continue through the remainder of February and into March. If you’d like more frequent updates on the progress of various bills, make sure to check out our new Bill Tracker feature on the website, with updates on when bills are scheduled, new sponsors added, committee action on the bills, and more. 

This past week, we engaged on: 

LB 161 – introduced by Senator Margo Juarez, this bill would adjust the TEEOSA formula that determines state funding for PK-12 public education. Currently, students in K-12 count as 1.0, while early childhood education, or Pre-K students, are calculated at .6 for purposes of the formula. OpenSky’s education funding expert, Connie Knoche, testified in support of this bill in the Education Committee, alongside several other education community stakeholders, as it would help expand access to early childhood education. Researchers have found that high quality Pre-K promotes higher earnings, lower public assistance and lower rates of criminal activity than children in a control group who did not receive early childhood education. 

LB 303 – introduced by Senator Jana Hughes proposes some bold steps in re-imagining the way the state manages the TEEOSA formula. It would increase state investments in K-12 education by increasing foundation aid, while lowering the local effort rate and maximum levy in state statute. It would also establish a commission to review and adjust the formula annually, something OpenSky has long advocated for, helping to mitigate significant swings in the formula and in tax rates caused by economic factors like property valuation spikes. The hearing was attended by stakeholders in the education community, agricultural trade groups, and OpenSky’s Connie Knoche, who testified in support of the bill. 

LB 481 – introduced by Senator Beau Ballard would establish a private school voucher program targeted at children in the foster care system. While we support efforts to lift up children served by foster care, the bill offers no guarantee of enrollment or retention in private schools for such children, nor does it address barriers such as transportation or special education status that often limit access to utilizing such vouchers. This bill also provides no way to measure whether students would be receiving a quality education because it lacks testing requirements that would allow the evaluation of student progress at private schools. For these reasons, OpenSky submitted a letter in opposition to this legislation. 

LB 692 introduced by Senator Dave Murman was heard in the Revenue Committee and would impose a fourth restriction on local school districts’ ability to collect property taxes to fund their schools. While much attention has been paid to reducing schools’ reliance on property taxes, reducing the property tax request authority at this time will negatively impact school districts. When comparing actual property tax requested for the general and building funds in 2022/23 to 2023/24, 90 school districts requested less in property tax in 2023/24 than they did in the prior year and 82 school districts had a property tax request increase of less than 3%. The average property tax increase in 2023/24 was 1.4%. We believe that is a reflection that the current system is working to prevent significant increases in property tax asking, and further restrictions would be overly burdensome and harmful to our PK-12 schools. Connie Knoche testified to that effect in the committee. 

Coming up this week:

OpenSky will be back in familiar committees like Revenue and Appropriations this week, offering input on the mainline budget bill (LB 261) and transfers from cash funds (LB 264), as well as LB 710 from Senator Eliot Bostar, which increases the Earned Income Tax Credit, a measure OpenSky supports. We will also share concerns about LB 328 which would change provisions of the documentary stamp tax.