Governor Jim Pillen on Building a More Competitive Nebraska

One way to control spending is strong caps.

The growth of local property taxes.

And there were some caps put in place a few years back.

What do you think about putting stronger or more meaningful caps in place and what should they look like in your opinion? And why do you believe they're necessary?

Yeah, well, I believe they're necessary.

I just touched on it.

You know, we are not good at confronting our neighbors on local government spending.

And sometimes, you know, people...

And people that get elected are not good at saying no to their neighbors.

So whoever the squeakiest wheel is that wants more and more, that just raises it for everybody.

So I'm a believer that we need hard caps.

I'm a believer that we got to quit being Nebraska nice.

I can tell you from my seat, there's a lot of people respectfully not happy with me because I've said no to everything.

I've said, I understand the difference between spending and investing and when people wanna spend and wanna keep, I've just said, no, we're not gonna do that.

We are going to shrink government.

Government has gotten bloated in this state.

We're gonna shrink government and it's everywhere.

it's really really important uh educating our children is gigantic uh it's the highest priority uh that from my seat it's kids we all agree our kids are future but if if your solution is more money and more people we're not on the same page we have to be innovative uh we need to pay teachers more we sure as heck got to figure out how to educate our children more efficiently uh you know i'm a believer the state should be funding education and it should be consistent across the state and not be different in every school district it's it's the teosa formula should have been trashed a long time ago in 1990 jim if the goal was The goal was for the state, the TEOSA formula was started, the goal to the state fund education and lower property taxes.

And exact opposites taking place.

That's where we, the state, need to fund education.

We've already, we increased it 35%.

There's some people think I'm against public education.

Are you kidding me? I've met with public educators everywhere.

We increased funding through the Education Future Fund, Foundation Aid.

dollar for dollar property tax relief for every district.