Tim Skubick

In this corner weighing in at $90 million is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

In that corner tipping the scales at $5 billion is House GOP Speaker Matt Hall.

And lucky you, you have a right side seat to what could turn out to be an historic legislative fight over property tax relief that could influence who the next governor will be and which party will control the house and senate. In other words this is the big enchilada in this town.

If you missed it, both political leaders and their respective parties have internal polling that suggests that in this election year a sure fire ticket to winning is linked to the tax issue which has dogged previous legislatures over the years.

It’s a rich political history that reached its modern day apex on one summers night in 1993 when then state Senator Debbie Stabenow set the senate on its ear when she offered a proposal to eliminate the property tax. And while she could not have predicted this, the crafty guy sitting in the governor’s chair sent word to his senate GOP leader to take the deal thus calling her bluff. And when the dust settled Gov. John Engler and the lawmakers wiped out the property tax. $6.5 billion down the drain without a back up plan to replace it. And to make an incredibly 20 year tax relief story short, they got about 70% of Michigan voters to replace the lost revenue for schools and local governments by increasing the sales tax in 1994.

Fast forward to round two.

The governor tip-toed into the fray with her plan to give 355,000 senior citizens a $90 million property tax break amounting to about two months of groceries.

The GOP Speaker doesn’t tip-toe around much so he unloaded his “bold” and attention-getting $5 billion list of property tax cuts as long as your arm.

(1) Wipe out the business personal property tax which would give the state’s major utilities a boat load of extra cash to beef up the state’s aging power grid.

(2) In return for that the Speaker told the big wigs at Consumers Energy and DTE, they must cough up “at least a billion dollar roll back on our energy bills.”

(3) Eliminate the so-called Education Tax that funnels billions of bucks to schools.

(4) Eradicate the so-called “Pop-up” tax where by the buyers of a home have to pay a huge property tax that is higher then the sellers ever paid. “It’s unfair,” the speaker asserts and discourages home buyers and seniors who move into a smaller home. They get stuck with the pop-up on that property as well.

As you know local governments and schools are hugely dependent on property tax cash but the speaker assures them, without supplying the details, that he will “back-fill (repay) schools and we’re going to back fill the local governments. It’s really important that they are” taken care of. That “oh yeah!” you just heard is from those two entities.

So this sets the table for a debate that has election year ramifications written all over it because giving money back to citizens/voters is a proven method for getting their vote.

Play this out.

If the Democrats don’t play ball with the wily speaker and up the amount of tax cuts, the speaker, who wants to hold onto control of the House, will run nasty commercials against the D’s with one simple sentence: House Republicans tried to give you some money back but the Democrats blocked it.

A game changer? What do you think?

Assuming the Democrats can figure this out, how far can they go to sweeten the property tax relief and still keep their teachers and local government officials on their side?

Of course the easy way out of all this is for both sides to cooperate, make deal, and then dump on the citizens the task of supporting a tax hike to pay for all this back-filling which is precisely what the good ole boys in girls in Lansing did back with Proposal A. They put on the ballot a tax hike and advised the citizens that if they didn’t like the sales tax, the legislature would have to impose an income tax increase thus washing their hands of the dirty work as the voters imposed this on themselves. Brilliant hey?!

Proposal A was adopted.

The speaker has talked about a November 2026 ballot strategy but if not, he is willing to use the legislature to grant some tax relief but he’ll need some D’s to join him.

It’s likely that those Democrats who are in districts that are evenly divided, so-called swing districts that go either R or D, they are likely to vote yes.

If you are still awake after weeding through this labyrinth of twists and turns, you can see how this debate is complicated but yet surprisingly simple.

Do lawmakers want to compromise with a bi-partisan plan or duke it out and let the chips fall where they land.

At this early read, you can pretty much guess what the smart thing to do really is. Getting there could be the ugly part.