Sheehy touts governor's tax cutting plan

Lt. Governor Rick Sheehy visits with Duane Tappe of McCook, Thursday afternoon, at the McCook Ben Nelson Regional Airport. (Bruce Baker/McCook Daily Gazette)

McCOOK, Nebraska -- Landing at the McCook airport Thursday afternoon in support of the governor's State of the State address, Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy said Nebraska is in a better position than a lot of states which are still dealing with deficit problems.

Sheehy credited the work of the governor's office, Nebraska Legislature and restraint on the part of state agencies that had contained budget growth to a minimum.

Sheehy responded to questions from McCook community leaders following his presentation, starting with questions about what would happen if the agriculture industry began to see a recession.

Sheehy said work to reduce taxes had taken place in past years and was ongoing, in an effort to diversify the state's portfolio of industries, which would in turn lessen its reliance on agriculture and the overall impact to the state of an agricultural recession.

Executive Director of the McCook Economic Development Corp., Rex Nelson, expressed his concern to Sheehy pertaining to a recent effort to integrate the Department of Economic Development into the Department of Labor. "We have talked about that a lot in the last several years. There is similar work done by those departments in attracting work and jobs," said Sheehy, who added that the idea was become more business-centric. Sheehy said there were some entities of the Department of Labor that would be better off in other areas as well, and said he had heard similar concerns from Travel and Tourism that they felt lost by being rolled into the Department of Economic Development.

One citizen in attendance expressed concerns to Sheehy that continuing with the reduction of state funding to cover only 95 percent of the expense of Medicaid patients, that hospitals were required to provide care for, was putting the remaining five percent of the bill onto everyone else, in the form of higher insurance premiums.

Sheehy said there was approximately a billion dollars going towards K-12 education, a billion dollars going towards higher education and another billion dollars going into Medicaid. He explained that you could shuffle the money around inside of each, but at the end of the day you were still working with the same amount of funding. Sheehy said that the state contribution to Medicaid was only about a third of the funding piece for that entity.