Republican leaders in the Kansas House are trying to devise a way to pass the Senate’s tax plan, but follow it up with a so-called “trailer” bill that would remove a number of tax policies that many House members find objectionable.

If successful, that could pave the way for closing the 2015 session, which is now in its record-setting 111th day.

The Senate’s tax plan relies heavily on increased sales and cigarette taxes — but no tax on the now-exempt business income of more than 330,000 business owners — to raise about $423 million in revenue to balance next year’s budget.

In order to get that through the Senate, though, a number of other policy pieces attractive to conservatives had to be added onto the bill, most of which were never discussed in committee hearings or on the floor of either chamber before they wound up in a conference committee report.

Those include a kind of property tax lid for cities and counties; putting a sunset on a whole host of income tax credits and sales and property tax exemptions; and an expanded voucher program to fund scholarships for public school students to attend private and parochial schools.

House tax committee chairman Marvin Kleeb, R-Overland Park, is said to be working behind the scenes, trying to figure out what needs to go into a trailer bill in order to make the base bill palatable to House members.
But there is also a large amount of distrust between the two chambers, and between differing factions within those chambers. As a result, there is reluctance in both chambers to vote on anything without an iron-clad guarantee that the other side will hold up its end of the bargain.

“The thing you learn in politics is, you want to make sure that you have the ability to hold your position before you give the keys to the car to somebody else,” House Majority Leader Jene Vickrey of Louisburg said. “We’re going to make sure that we get what our members want, and then negotiate from there.”

It was expected that Kleeb would unveil a new House proposal during a 1 p.m. conference committee meeting, but that was postponed until 3 p.m. It was at least the fourth consecutive postponement of a conference committee meeting in the last two days.