In his last State of the State address, Gov,. Jim Douglas demonstrated once again that he is tenacious, determined, single-minded, and bold.

And maybe a little clueless?

It was a fairly long (5,917-word, 50-minute) speech to the Legislature, clear if not eloquent in composition, crisply delivered, politely received.

And familiar.

In fact, if some in the audience thought they had heard similar sentiments similarly expressed not all that long ago, they were right. Similar statements had been similarly expressed a year and a day ago in the same place by the same speaker, in his fourth inaugural address.

Leading some to wonder why, early in the speech, Douglas warned his listeners not to “choose to recycle old ideas and hope for a different outcome.”

In this case, the governor recycled some of his old ideas, including several that he’d proposed last year. He didn’t get them then. If he’s hoping for a different outcome this time, he would seem to be ignoring his own advice.

After all, little has changed. It’s the same Legislature that ignored most of his proposals last year and over-rode his veto twice. If anything, the lawmakers are more confident than they were a year ago, especially because one thing that has changed is that Douglas decided not to run for re-election.

In other words, he’s a lame duck. He keeps insisting that he isn’t, though he is, or at least that it has not weakened him politically, which would be a first in the history of the country, if not the world.

So why did he make the same controversial (and probably doomed) proposals again?

Because he really believes in them. Because he’s tenacious and bold. Because he thinks this time he might prevail.

Or because he’s clueless.

As he did last year, Douglas urged the Legislature to set a cap on local school spending. It didn’t. As he did last year (though in slightly less blunt language) he called the school finance system “broken,” implying that the lawmakers should replace it. As was true last year, he didn’t specify what the replacement would look like, leaving that to the lawmakers. Perhaps because most legislators don’t agree that the system (Acts 60 and 68) is “broken,” they came up with no replacement last year. They won’t this year, either.

But Douglas did not stop at recycling his old ideas that were not adopted. No, bulling right ahead with little hope of success, he came up with some new ideas that are almost certainly not to be adopted, as follows:

–Repeal – or at least pledge to repeal in the near future — the capital gains and estate tax increases adopted last year;

–Require teachers to pay 20 percent of their health insurance premiums;

–Trim the “income sensitivity” provision of the statewide education property tax so that middle-income homeowners pay more and the wealthy pay less. (of course, he didn’t word it quite that bluntly, but that’s the gist of his proposal);

–And while this was more a suggestion than a specific proposition, Douglas made clear he thought it would be a good idea if all the teachers emulated state workers and took an immediate three percent pay cut.

(Not an outlandish idea, but unrealistic. The state employees agreed to the cut in their new, statewide, contract. Teachers contracts are district-by-district, and they do not all expire at once).

It was hardly necessary to wait until the speech was over to figure out that Douglas was not convincing the legislators. Six times the audience in the House Chamber interrupted the speech with applause. But except for the early support for his tribute to Vermonters fighting (or soon to be) overseas, almost all the clapping came from the balcony, full of old friends and administration officials.

Down on the floor, where the lawmakers sat, few applauded except for the stalwart but decidedly outnumbered Republican contingent—50 of 150 House members, seven of 30 senators, and not all of them firm Douglas allies.

Perhaps because they know they have the votes and Douglas doesn’t, the Democratic Legislative leaders were relatively restrained in their post-speech comments. Snate President (and Democratic governor hopeful) Peter Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith both said they were willing to discuss the governor’s ideas. Sen. Susan Bartlett of Morrisville, another candidate for governor, called the speech a “pragmatic first step” in this year’s legislative process. Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond, yet another gubernatorial hopeful, said he agreed with Douglas that the state is in a “tough” fiscal bind.

Then, bit by bit, they began to say what they really thought. Douglas’s proposed tax cuts would “reduce Vermont revenue by roughly $28 million,” Shumlin said. Bartlett said that Douglas “wants to have his cake and eat it, too,” because he didn’t call for repealing the income tax cuts adopted last year, only the capital gains and estate tax increases.

Racine said the speech sounded like “a list of the things he promised to do seven years ago and failed to do,” such as extending broadband Internet service statewide and cleaning up Lake Champlain. And Sen. Mark MacDonald, a Williamstown Democrat, said Douglas’s proposed changes in the income sensitivity mechanism would “raise the property taxes of working Vermonters and cut them for out-of-staters,” some of whom own large tracts of land. Income sensitivity used to hold down the tax bills of 80 percent of Vermonters, MacDonald said. It is now down to 70 percent, and Douglas wants to reduce it further.

Despite these dismissals, a few of Douglas’s proposals might actually get adopted, though probably with some alterations. Regardless of party, almost everybody in state government agrees that public education in Vermont is expensive, in large part because there are, as Shap Smith put it, “legitimate questions about the pupil-teacher ratios.”

They are very low, 11-to-1 statewide, Douglas said, and he proposed “a mechanism to fill only one vacancy for every two retirements.”

A politically sophisticated plan, because it doesn’t require firing anyone, and because raising the ratio to 13 to 1, as he suggested, hardly degrades the quality of education. Perhaps not a realistic plan, though. It’s based on statewide numbers, but teachers neither teach their classes nor retire statewide. They do it school by school, where the numbers may not always add up (or subtract down) precisely the right way to allow reducing faculty without letting some classes get too big.

Still, here’s one area – quite possibly one of the few– where the legislators might build on (or off) one of Douglas’s proposals.

At last month’s meeting of the Current Use Advisory Board, William Johnson of the Tax Department noted that “there will be a lot of bickering” about the Current Use policy in the Legislature next year.

The reason, he said, is that the policy costs a lot of money. It reduces property tax revenue by some $35 million. If that money all went into the Education Fund, Johnson said, the statewide school property tax rate might be some four cents lower. With legislators eager to keep residential tax rates down, Johnson said, “the debate will be on.”

Actually, the debate will be on before the Legislature reconvenes in January. The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee meets next month, and Current Use is likely to be on its agenda.

As Johnson indicated, the debate could get heated, and his remarks illustrated why. On the one hand, almost everyone (certainly including Johnson) favors the policy, under which farmers and woodlot owners pay property tax based on the revenue potential of their land, not its full market value. The policy is credited for keeping Vermont’s working farms and forests economically viable, with financial and environmental benefits for everybody.

On the other hand, there’s that cost to the other taxpayers that Johnson mentioned. Keeping farm and forest property taxes lower makes residential property taxes higher.

And in most states, surely including this one, anything that tends to make residential property taxes higher is political dynamite. In fact, as some see it, there has been an intertwined relationship between Current Use and residential property taxes for more than a decade, and today’s Current Use controversy stems from an effort to alter that relationship.

Among those who see it that way is Sen. Mark MacDonald, a Williamstown Democrat, a member of the Finance Committee, and identified by defenders of Current Use as one of the lawmakers who wants to get more money out of the farm and forest owners.

Not that MacDonald opposes Current Use. That would be hypocritical because he owns farm and forest land and benefits from it, as, he said, do many other members of the Legislature. (And many members of the Current Use Advisory Board, including Chairman John McClain. In some circles, that would be considered a conflict of interest. In Vermont, it’s just the way things are).

But to MacDonald, Current Use in its present form was part of a political agreement reached in 1997 when the Legislature passed Act 60 and created three tax breaks: Eliminating the machinery and equipment tax paid by businesses into the Education Fund; expanding and guaranteeing Current Use (as opposed to subjecting it to the annual appropriations process); and “income sensitivity” (though Macdonald doesn’t like the term), allowing most homeowners “the right to pay school taxes based on income,” rather than the full market value of their properties.

The problem, according to MacDonald and his allies, most of them Democrats in the Legislature, is that in the last few years Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration has upset the balance by fiddling with the tax break that goes to the home-owners.

“What the Administration has done in last several years is to say that some homeowners are not paying enough in property taxes based on their income,” MacDonald said, “Then when the Senate Finance Committee suggested the Current Use people kicking back in to share the burden, they suddenly showed up and said, ‘how come we’re being picked on?’”

To Ed Larson of the Vermont Forest Products Association, MacDonald is “listening to a populist constituency that has this vision of rich landowners from outside getting a tax break, coming up here, driving up our property values and posting the land.”

Indicating that to some extent this dispute, like so many Vermont political battles, is tribal, each side assuming the worst of the other based on its own stereotypes.

But it’s more than that, in part because Current Use is likely to grow as the full market value of rural property continues to rise, creating an incentive for landowners to enroll in the program.

Whether today’s Current Use enrollees feel picked on, they certainly oppose any change that might raise their taxes. In fact, Larson told the Advisory Board that, if anything, taxes on forest land owners should be lower because, with prices so low, their taxes eat up half the revenue they are getting from the timber.

In a later interview, Larson acknowledged that he’d be happy with the status quo.

He’s not likely to get it because even many of Current Use’s champions acknowledge that some landowners are abusing the policy and that it now is being exploited by some property owners who are not what the original designers of the program had in mind.

To be eligible for Current Use, land has to be actively farmed or logged. At the Advisory Board meeting, members talked about multi-acre chunks of farmland that had been taken out of production but was still being taxed at its “use” rate. Furthermore, nobody disputed Deb Kingbsbury of Vershire, the self-appointed gadfly of the Current Use issue, when she said that some property-owners were “just using the program as a tax break.”

Deb Brighton, the natural resource economic policy analyst from Salisbury, who was once director of the Current Use program, said it was initially intended to benefit “real farmers,” (and by extension, “real loggers”) meaning those whose livelihoods depend on their income from agriculture or stumpage.

Now she said, a good deal of the land is owned by people whose “income comes from somewhere else. “ They are still providing the valuable service of keeping the land from being developed. But, Brighton said, “that person would do the same thing if you only paid him $25 an acre,” rather than providing the full benefits of Current Use.

Easier said than done, she acknowledged. Deciding which land is being preserved as “an amenity value” as opposed to a “production value” is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. In fact, it’s quite likely that something will be done to get more revenue out of Current Use land. Some means of accomplishing that have to do with the technicalities of implementing the policy, as tentatively recommended in a draft proposal worked out by some environmentalists who support Current Use, and who will discuss their draft at a meeting in Randolph next week.

The danger, in the view of many, is that, in Deb Brighton’s words, simply raising the “use value” on which the land is taxed, “wouldn’t work for people really using the land.”

In other words, it might put small and medium-sized farms and woodlots out of business, a result nobody wants.

Expect, as Bill Johnson said, “a lot of bickering.”