John Kitzhaber has made progress on three promises
By Ryan Kost
Published on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 12:00 p.m.
For those of you waiting with bated breath to see whether Gov. John Kitzhaber has been making any progress with his campaign promises, we’ve gone through and updated the status of a few of them now that his budget proposal has been released:
A cut to capital gains
During the 2010 campaign season, Kitzhaber promised to cut the state’s capital gains tax -- it’s one of the highest in the nation, which critics say isn’t very welcoming to new business. In fact, a cut in the tax is included in his budget proposal. It’s a pretty small one -- about $25 million in all for the biennium -- but we’ve promoted this promise to In the Works
A unified school budget
Kitzhaber told voters he planned to create a single budget for Oregon education, from kindergarten through college. He seems to be making the first steps toward keeping this promise. The concept is included in the budget and he plans to announce the formation of a board to structure the budget soon. There’s still a lot of work to be done -- and some legislation to be passed -- before this becomes a promise kept, but it does appear to be In the Works.
A stable education budget
The governor made stabilizing education funding a big cornerstone of his campaign last year. It’ll be a while before we can say whether this is a promise kept, but Kitzhaber has laid out a base funding level in his budget proposal: $5.56 billion. Can he persuade the Legislature to OK that level and, even so, can he actually keep funding there? We’ll have to wait and see. For now, it’s a promise In the Works.
For those of you who might have missed it, we have a final verdict on Kitzhaber’s promise to ask all state managers and directors for resignations. The governor asked 24 agency heads for their letters of resignation. That wasn’t quite everybody, though, so we’re calling this one a Compromise.
Be sure to check back as the budgeting process and legislative session progress, we’ll be updating these and other promises.
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