Left on cutting room floor in ’24, tax committee dusts off omnibus bill provisions for another look

Let’s see. Where were we?

The last time the DFL held the House Taxes Committee chair, it was May 2024 and marathon conference committee negotiations with the Senate reached a conclusion that was both anti-climactic and something of a bold crescendo.

Anti-climactic in that the bulk of the final House tax bill was cast aside in the session’s final hours in favor of making the tax bill a 1,400-plus-page vehicle for everything else that had been tabled in the House over the previous week. But that spurred quite a dramatic finale, infuriated Republicans howling in protest as the legislation was approved along party lines with minutes to spare.

So what happened to all of those measures in the 2024 House tax bill that didn’t make it out of conference committee? Well, almost all of them have been picked up off the cutting room floor and reassembled into HF2274.

On her first day as co-chair of the House Taxes Committee after the body reached a 67-67 split on Monday, Rep. Aisha Gomez (DFL-Mpls) decided to go big. She’s sponsoring an 80-page bill full of changes to Minnesota’s tax code that looks a lot like a first offer to the committee’s co-chair, Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston), and his fellow Republicans in negotiations over how a 2025 tax bill should look.

As amended and amended again, the bill is a smorgasbord of changes in tax law, ranging from individual and corporate income taxes to property taxes to sales taxes to local government aids and beyond. It was laid over for possible omnibus bill inclusion, but Gomez emphasized that it was intended to launch the conversation about what should go into such a bill.

“Last year, we were able to get four or five provisions from our 2024 tax bill passed in the final agreement,” Gomez said. “But there was a lot that was left on the table. So we’re just rehearing these to get them into the committee’s jurisdiction for our negotiations at the end of the day.”

“Is this normal?” asked Rep. Wayne Johnson (R-Cottage Grove). “In other committees, I see previous bills rewritten and then we hear them individually. … It’s kind of overwhelming to know what each of these are.”

“It’s not something that happens every year,” Gomez replied. “There was a property tax division report that we reheard in its entirety in 2019 or 2020; stuff that had been undone from the previous year. Chair [Sen. Ann Rest (DFL-New Hope)] has done it in the Senate last year.”

“I wouldn’t call it normal, but this is the tax committee; we are trend setters,” Davids added. “And I think it’s useful that we’re doing this. It’s early on. We’ve got time to look at these things. And then the committee will have to decide what’s in and what’s out. … And there’s a lot more than DFL stuff in here. There’s Republican stuff, too.”

Among testifiers, the provisions inspiring the strongest reactions called for requiring disclosure of some corporate franchise tax return information (both for and against), establishing a direct free file system for the individual income tax, and expanding the child tax credit to include 18-year-olds.