Arkansas Speaker of the House Rep. Brian Evans, R-Cabot, was satisfied with his first legislative session in charge, but he thinks tax cuts may wait with the uncertainty around federal Medicaid funding.
Appearing on this week’s edition of Capitol View, Evans said he thinks progress from two of the session’s big issues – maternal health and higher education – will take some time to surface.
“With maternal health, we’re looking at generational change, and so making more affordable healthcare and accessibility to expectant mothers and their newborns, that’s just going to take time to see the rewards of that. Looking at higher ed, it’s the same thing. It’s not going to be a quick overnight change,” said Evans.
The Arkansas Senate failed to advance a funding bill for a new state prison late in the session. The $750 million funding measure failed five times to get a 75% vote from senators. Evans said he was confident that House members would have approved the budget bill if it had made it to his chamber.
“I believe the votes were there,” said Evans. “As each day went by, it put a little bit more pressure on me and in the House because each time that the vote failed in the Senate, that was just another day that we would not have the opportunity in the House to really debate it thoroughly. But I think we had the votes. I believe that if it came to us, we would’ve passed that.”
Evans said the federal debate regarding Medicaid funding has state legislators monitoring closely the future of the program. Federal Medicaid cuts, which could impact the Arkansas budget by hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, have talks of the next state tax income cut on pause.
“As the Medicaid issue kind of stabilizes the discussions with that, I think that postpones any potential talk of a special session. There just doesn’t seem to be anything really pressing outside of that to call a special,” he said.
Arkansas has cut taxes four times in the past three years. The current personal income tax rate is 3.9%, while the corporate tax rate stands at 4.3%. The call for a special session is the prerogative of Gov. Sarah Sanders, but just this week, the state reduced its potential surplus for the fiscal year that ends June 30. Uncertainty in Washington and cloudiness on the state budget horizon give further support to Speaker Evans’ caution regarding additional tax cuts.
“We’re committed and we have held each of these [tax] cuts at a conservative measure, making sure that we are keeping a good fiduciary responsibility to the state budget. And so our plan was going into this regular session to take a look at some additional tax cuts, namely income tax cuts in the fiscal, and I think we’re still on track to do that,” added Evans. “I think as far as income tax, yes, it’ll be the fiscal session.”
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