By Larry Riley in the Muncie Star-Press:
The proposal pushed by Gov. Mike Pence to eliminate or reduce business personal property taxes in Indiana appears off the table this legislative session and headed to a study committee.
The idea of making the state more competitive by taxing businesses less joins just about every other of his suggestions for this year’s General Assembly. For a guy who lots of people think wanted to show presidential timber, Pence has his hands full just trying to look like a gubernatorial leader.
Statewide, eliminating business personal property taxes would have taken something like $1 billion or so from local governments — not necessarily a bad move if those local governments would restructure, consolidate and streamline, but they won’t.
So they’d suffer immensely.
That’s not the total reason why legislators are lukewarm at best to the initiative, though howling from officials at local levels throughout the state didn’t hurt opposition at the statehouse.
(A more fundamental reason is legislative leaders don’t want to open the state’s two-year budget, approved last year. Thus the governor’s last minute willingness to replace some or all of the lost local revenues with state money didn’t move anybody, either.)
What exactly is business personal property, or BPP, and what exactly does this tax mean in Delaware County and Muncie?
BPP is anything tangible that businesses use to engage in commerce: furniture, computers, machinery (I guess computers are machines), anything not real estate (that is, land and buildings).
Not included, however, is inventory, and a number of news story headlines unfortunately conflate the two. Inventory, which eventually becomes the actual product sold, is not taxed and hasn’t been for a decade.
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See the full article here:
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014303020010
