The Revenue Committee heard testimony Feb. 3 on a bill that would create a tax credit for volunteer emergency responders.<\/p>\n
LB886, introduced by Sen. Al Davis of Hyannis, would create a $250 refundable tax credit for volunteer emergency responders, rescue squad members and firefighters who meet certain criteria. The bill would establish a point system for volunteer emergency responders, firefighters and rescue squad members to determine annual qualifications for the credit. <\/p>\n
The bill is estimated to reduce tax revenue by $2.2 million in fiscal year 2017-2018 and again in FY2018-2019.<\/p>\n
Davis said the bill would help recruit and retain volunteer firefighters and emergency responders in rural communities, which are seeing a significant drop in the number of volunteers. Without volunteers, Davis said, those communities would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for private emergency services, a cost many counties could not bear without raising property taxes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people put in a tremendous amount of time,\u201d Davis said, adding that volunteers also spend their own money to attend certification and training courses.<\/p>\n
Micheal Dwyer, a member of the Arlington volunteer fire and rescue service, testified in support of the bill. He said some rural counties face a critical shortage of volunteers and response times have fallen to dangerous levels in some places.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to send a message to the volunteer fire and [emergency medical service] providers across the state that the state truly cares about what we\u2019re doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
No one spoke in opposition to the bill and the committee took no immediate action on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Revenue Committee heard testimony Feb. 3 on a bill that would create a tax credit for volunteer emergency responders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-18322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revenue","tag-sen-al-davis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18322"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18328,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322\/revisions\/18328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}