By MELINDA DESLATTE Associated Press
Published: Friday, June 3, 2011 at 5:58 p.m.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Louisiana lawmakers are starting to coalesce around a group of tax breaks they will support - and think they can afford - in the current regular session.

The House Ways and Means Committee has freed a handful of credit and exemption measures for items like historic renovations, research and development, and digital media businesses, proposals with fairly low costs to the state. The rest of tax break ideas, including hefty property tax cuts, credits for charitable organizations and an array of business tax exemptions, remain in the committee's "bone pile" - not outright rejected, but not advanced either.

The budget largely accounts for the passage of those measures that got out of committee this week and will be considered by the full House. The price tag for those bills was around $7 million for the upcoming fiscal year and $27 million a year later.

Rep. Hunter Greene, chairman of Ways and Means, suggested few others may escape from committee.

"Those are the ones that for now that we're letting out," said Greene, R-Baton Rouge. "When I looked at cost and benefit, those are the ones that I felt like were doable."

The Senate has taken a more liberal approach with the tax breaks it has approved, but those will be bottled up in the Ways and Means Committee and only a few are likely to emerge.

There's one big-ticket exception that could peel away billions.

In the Senate, a proposal by Sen. Rob Marionneaux, D-Livonia, to repeal the state's income tax, has advanced further than expected and hasn't been scrapped, despite its steep cost.

Greene has proposed a similar idea, though he's delayed any action on it while Marionneaux continues to press ahead, with a full Senate debate scheduled next week. Marionneaux is developing a proposal that would stretch the repeal over 10 years and eliminate some of the state's current tax breaks given to citizens and companies, though he has yet to specific which.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has been largely dismissive of the income tax repeal idea.

"We're not taking it seriously until it's accompanied by a plan that doesn't devastate health care and education," Jindal said.

The House and Senate have three weeks to come to agree on which tax breaks they'll back.

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