Senate GOP takes stand: Trim taxes by $100M

"It's early in the session. I think there are a lot of tax proposals in play," Mower said, adding that "part of what's in play right now is what the February estimates will be. We recognize we aren't dealing with static numbers."

House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander, R-Provo, said it was clear where the Senate was heading, "but we decided on a $230 million tax cut." The Deseret Morning News reported earlier this week that Senate Republicans were strongly leaning toward a $100 million tax cut.

"We're glad they finally pulled something together," Alexander said. "But there's five weeks of the session left to discuss this."

The House is set to vote today on HB109, a House leadership-supported bill also backed by the governor that would take all of the sales tax off of food right at the register. The bill slightly raises the city and county option sales tax rates.

That allows those entities to gather more sales tax overall but doesn't cost them any revenue. Under HB109 the state would lose about $167 million annually — the biggest single slice of the overall tax-cutting pie in the 2006 Legislature.

Valentine said if the bill, as expected, comes to the Senate, it would be heard in committee. If it ends up being given preliminary approval on the Senate floor, however, he said it will be put on hold before a final vote could be taken.

Senators looked at six options during their caucus, ranging from wiping out the sales tax on food entirely, to raising state and local sales taxes to make up the lost revenue, to doing nothing.

Some of those proposals apparently had limited support, but in the end, Valentine said the caucus backed the idea of a tax credit as part of a package that included a total of about $100 million in cuts.

Utahns overwhelmingly want the sales tax taken off food, according to polls. In June, 68 percent of residents surveyed by Dan Jones & Associates for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV said they favored removing the sales tax from food.

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Contributing: Josh Loftin

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