Lt. Governor Kelly Talks about Taxes, Legislature and Recidivism to Executive Club

This past Monday was day 37 of the current 60-day session of the Nebraska Unicameral for 2024. So, the presider over the session, the Lt. Governor Joe Kelly, joined the membership of the Executive Club at their weekly luncheon held in downtown Lincoln at the Graduate Hotel to share what’s going on over at the Capitol.

When talking about the calendar, Kelly said the legislature is done with their committee hearings in the afternoons and all the new bills have already been introduced. He said they will now be going full time during the days and at sometimes into the night to push legislation through April for the remaining session.

“This is our second session and when I say our, I mean Jim Pillen and I,” Kelly said. “We were sworn in January of 2023 and we had that long session of 90 days and we did a lot of what we think was good and productive work with income tax, corporate income taxes down to 3.9% for the top bracket beginning next year and very competitive with our surrounding states.”

In addition to bringing down taxes, Kelly said the administration is focused on putting in place a plan for a steady reduction of state expenditures to help meet his budget objectives over the next few years.

“We have committed to reducing actual spending by 3% from what we spent last year. The year after that in 2025, our goal is to reduce actual spending by 6%,” said Kelly, a native Nebraskan from Lexington. “All of this is for two reasons, and the obvious is there is no organization as big as the state government can’t stand to have something permanently clipped out of its budget. But secondly, you can’t really go around discussing taxes unless you are doing everything you can to keep your spending down.”

Then Kelly honed in on one of the governor’s primary objectives since he took office.

“The hot topic for the rest of the term will be what are we going to do about property taxes? Because the good thing about property taxes is, there’s only really one thing right now where everybody across the state is equally angry about and rightfully so,” said Kelly, who received both his undergraduate and law degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It’s just a heckuva burden whether you’re a farmer, rancher or living in town trying to buy your first home or trying to stay in your last home. It’s just difficult. So that’s a key focus.”

Another key focus is to reduce recidivism within the Nebraska Corrections Department. A key hire for the administration to improve on the state’s numbers of less former prisoners returning to their former confines has been the recruitment of Rob Jeffreys, who most recently was working in the penal system in Illinois. Kelly said Pillen and him had a phone conversation with Jeffreys which interested the candidate enough to garner an interview.

“Jim (Pillen) and I met him at the Omaha Airport. They found a room for us up in the concourse,” recalled Kelly. “We had a great talk with him and we knew that he was the guy because our goal there was just this simple. Is to do what we can to reduce the number of people that come back. Recidivism. Nationally your number is about 30% of those who are walking out of a prison door today are going to be back in 3 years.”

Kelly, who previously was the Lancaster County attorney, said there are a certain amount of the criminal element in that approximate one-third that simply have enough self-destructive behavior that they may not enable them to make corrections to keep them out of prison. But, with Nebraska’s recidivism rate being below the national average at 28%, Kelly believes there is still room for improvement.

And, Kelly was fascinated to learn that the Executive Club will be able to meet and greet the new Nebraska State Corrections Director on March 25th at their weekly luncheon.

“It’s exciting you’ll have Rob (Jeffreys) here and I think he’ll leave you believing that it can be done. We can improve recidivism here in Nebraska,” Kelly beamed.

Finally, Kelly brought up some strange happenings out west that has forced some legislation to pass in the east. It appears that some foreign actors may have some nefarious thoughts towards acquiring some less than savory land in western Nebraska. The activity caused the Legislature to react.

“It’s a national issue right now. So there’s a lot entities that are gobbling up a lot of ground in places where it’s not a particularly valuable piece of ground in Nebraska. You could call it marginal grazing ground out west and you have some really odd circumstances where somebody’s buying some property cash down, cash to the farmer. The whistle’s all go off and if you’re near Kimball where all those missile silos are, then you really start to thinking, let’s see what’s going on here?”

Legislative Bill 1120, introduced by State Senator Brian Harding from Gering, a bill that is intended to curb purchases of property in 8 Panhandle counties by anyone connected with a country or person determined by the federal government to be an adversary, was advanced Tuesday by a 38-0 vote in the Legislature.