Sen. Brewer

I am pleased to announce I have been re-elected to serve another term as the Senator for the 43rd District. It is a great honor to again be entrusted with this responsibility. I am glad this campaign is over so we can get back to focusing on the people I represent in Nebraska’s Legislature.

We have a number of issues we are working on for the next session which is only about sixty days away. I want to touch on a few ideas I am considering for bills. Like past years, these ideas came from my constituents.

Brand inspection: A number of senators in the body want to see it done away with. We defeated their attempt to do that last session, and we will probably have to do it again. The Brand Committee does have some issues that need to be addressed, but they will not be done away with on my watch.

State meat inspection: It should be easy to sell the most valuable product we produce in the Beef State. Right now it’s tough for small plants to get USDA inspection. We used to have a state meat inspection program. This bill would turn it back on. Small town meat lockers should be able to sell beef retail to the public. Our state government should make this easy for them to do while maintaining food safety standards every bit as careful as what the USDA requires.

Support for law enforcement: Recently the Governor of Florida announced a bill introduced at his request to strengthen the legal penalties for people who riot, destroy property and attack the police. We are putting a similar bill together for Nebraska. This will not be the easiest conversation to have in the Legislature, but I think it is an important one. We should do everything we can to protect public safety, and that means protecting our emergency responders, too.

Public power entities are subdivisions of state government. The legislature can organize them as “districts” with elected boards, or they can be organized as “cooperatives” where their wholesale customers (Nebraska’s 30+ rural electric associations) make up the board. Numerous incidents over the past four years make it very clear to me the “elected board” is a weak and ineffective check on the power of these massive government entities.

I plan to reintroduce my bill to require counties who wish to host wind energy facilities to have zoning regulations that address set-backs, noise and decommissioning. It is up to the county to define these three metrics, but having them established in a county zoning regulation should not be optional. Counties who ignore their citizens and stubbornly refuse to address these concerns are creating a lot of hard feelings and division in their communities. I aim to give these citizens a voice.

I am also planning to again propose an end to the wrong-headed practice of subjecting Social Security benefits to Nebraska’s income tax. We are one of only thirteen states that still do this and one of only six states that tax it as aggressively as we do. Taxing Social Security is flat wrong. Social Security is the only source of income for two-thirds of the people who are drawing it. They very clearly need the money more than the state government does.