Board OKs business tax, sick day, mail-in voting proposals

By David Eggert Associated Press LANSING (AP) - Michigan's election board approved petition forms last Thursday for ballot drives to increase business taxes for road improvements, require paid sick days and implement a mail-in voting system - bringing to eight the number of proposals for which supporters are gathering signatures. Labor-affiliated groups behind the corporate income tax and sick time measures must collect more than 252,000 valid voter signatures by June to put their initiated legislation to the Republican-controlled Legislature. If lawmakers do not act, the bills would go to a statewide vote in November 2016. The third measure, a constitutional amendment backed by a volunteer group, would make Michigan the fourth state to rely entirely on mail-in ballots for local, state and federal elections. The Let's Vote, Michigan ballot committee needs more than 315,000 signatures by next July to qualify for the 2016 ballot. The initiatives previously authorized include competing marijuana legalization efforts and bids to repeal Michigan's prevailing wage law covering state-financed construction projects, ban horizontal hydraulic fracturing and limit what health providers can charge auto crash victims. A spokesman for Citizens for Fair Taxes, which includes the Michigan Labor District Council, Operating Engineers and Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights, said hiking the corporate tax from 6 percent to 11 percent would "recoup" $900 million from a $2 billion business tax cut enacted in 2011 and earmark the additional revenue for deteriorating roads. Tom Lutz said the business community would still keep $1 billion-plus in tax breaks, and more than 90,000 smaller businesses would continue to no longer pay a state business tax. The GOP's overhaul partially offset the business tax cut by scaling back tax exemptions and credits for pensioners, homeowners, low-income earners and taxpayers with children. "We've got to stop putting everything on the backs of hard-working people and the poor middle class," said former Lenawee County Sheriff Larry Richardson, a Democrat. But Tricia Kinley, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce's senior director of tax & regulatory reform, said an 11 percent corporate tax rate would be the country's second-highest and be "crippling to so many of the employers that hire these engineers and carpenters." She said people got a "free ride with tax-free pensions," and she accused unions of misleading voters into thinking corporations received a "giant windfall" under the 2011 rewrite when many paid higher taxes because the state stopped double taxing smaller businesses. Since voters defeated a road-funding measure in May, the House and Senate have been at odds over how to generate at least $1.2 billion more a year that Republican Gov. Rick Snyder says is needed for road and bridge infrastructure. ------- Online: 2016 statewide petitions: http://1.usa.gov/1It9ZR2. Published: Mon, Aug 03, 2015