Last night my colleagues and I voted to move forward with fiscal responsibility and end the Brownback tax experiment. It’s not a perfect bill, but it’s an excellent step toward rebuilding our state.

I’m proud the bill reflects a genuine bipartisan solution, and am especially pleased with Democrats advocacy for the return of the childcare tax credit, mortgage deductions, property tax deductions, and medical expense deductions.

It also ends the glidepath to zero, closes the LLC loophole ensuring 330,000 people will now pay their fair share, and added a third bracket. These were important to providing a structural fix.

To do this, taxes were increased. Kansas couldn’t pay its bills otherwise. The good news? The rates paid now are still less than the rates we paid from 1993 – 2012.

There is still work to do in the legislature. We are waiting on the Governor to sign the bill that keeps guns out of hospitals and mental health centers. He also needs to sign the school finance bill so it can be reviewed by the Supreme Court to determine if it’s constitutional (I don’t think it is).

I’ll keep you posted as we continue our work to rebuild Kansas. We made progress yesterday and for that I’m pleased.

Jim Ward (D-Wichita) is the Assistant Minority Leader in the Kansas House of Representatives.