Moak named conferee on smoke tax bill

Published 6:00 am Friday, February 6, 2009

A Lincoln County legislator has been named a conferee to thejoint legislative committee that will attempt to iron out acompromise in raising the state’s cigarette tax, one of the biggestlegislative issues this year.

District 53 Rep. Bobby Moak, D-Bogue Chitto, is one of threeHouse Ways and Means Committee members who will make up thatchamber’s side of the six-member conference committee that willamend House Bill 364, the legislation calling for an increasedcigarette tax.

Moak will sit alongside Ways and Means Committee Chairman PercyWatson, D-Hattiesburg, and committee member Angela Cockerham,D-Magnolia, on the House side of the table. The Senate has not yetnamed its three conferees.

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“It looks like it’s a big issue, and I’m glad to be on thecommittee,” Moak said.

When passed by the House on Jan. 14, HB 364 called for thestate’s 18-cent cigarette tax to be raised to $1 per pack and didnot designate uses for the potential revenue. The Senate, however,lowered the tax to 49 cents per pack and earmarked part of therevenue to shore up car tag credits to counties for one year.

The House declined to concur with the Senate’s changes Thursday,setting up the coming conference committee debates. TheDemocrat-controlled House has always favored a higher cigarette taxwith some portion of the revenue designated for Medicaid or otherhealth-related programs.

“The Senate has simply picked the problem du jour and saidcigarette taxes will solve it,” Moak said of the Senate’s proposedearmark. “First it was fully funding [education], then dealing withMedicaid, then it was homestead [exemption], then it was car tags.Then, they cut the House position in half. The first thing is wehave to get a logical sequence here.”

Moak and other representatives have said HB 364 was passedthrough in general form just to get the bill in motion, saying allalong the real work would be done in conference committee.

Conferees from both chambers will either attempt to impose theirversion of the cigarette tax on the other or meet somewhere between49 cents and $1. Early speculation this session had the tax beingset at 60 cents per pack, but word that the federal government wasworking on its own cigarette tax increase – which it passed thisweek at 62 cents per pack – changed state circumstances.

Moak would not speculate on a desired total for the cigarettetax, but he did question the Senate’s explanation of lowering theHouse’s number in an effort to equalize Mississippi’s tax with thatof surrounding states.

“We know that, and we also know Arkansas yesterday doubled theirtax,” he said. “That pretty much tells you these median rangenumbers they were working on with surrounding states wouldn’t holdwater.”