Iowa business groups, undeterred by the lack of success this year in getting state lawmakers to lower property taxes, will make the issue a top priority once again in the 2012 legislative session.

The Iowa Chamber Alliance, a nonpartisan coalition representing 16 chambers of commerce and economic-development groups statewide, on November 30 released its 2012 legislative priorities. Property-tax relief topped the list.

"The table is set for a substantive dialogue," said John Stineman, executive director of the Iowa Chamber Alliance. "All the right people are talking, and they're talking about the right things. We just have to make sure that at the end of the day, they can reach an agreement."

In the nation, Iowa has the second-highest urban commercial property taxes and rural commercial property taxes, according to the National Taxpayers Conference. Its 50-state property-tax study is often cited by Governor Terry Branstad.

A law aimed at slashing the number of supervisors overseeing the work of Iowa state employees has never been fully implemented.

Lawmakers learned November 16 that Senate File 2088, the government reorganization bill signed into law in 2010, has languished because of a lack of feedback.

The law was designed to save the state money by finding efficiencies in government. It called for a "span of control," with a goal of one supervisor for every 15 workers.

But Jeff Panknen, chief operating officer for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services' Human Resources Enterprise, on November 16 told a panel of lawmakers that the Iowa Department of Management never gave feedback on a draft policy to implement the law in April 2010, so nothing was formalized.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller ranks second in the nation for receiving campaign money from lawyers in the past five years and is among the friendliest to trial lawyers' agenda, according to a report released October 25 by a conservative think tank.

But Miller denounced the report as inaccurate and called it a "cheap shot" from a corporate interest group. He said that campaign-finance data citing $338,223 in contributions in three weeks came from a discredited report, that claims about him keeping a low profile are "ridiculous," and that more-favorable data about Iowa's business climate are "conveniently omitted."

"If the Center for Legal Policy were subject to Iowa's Consumer Fraud Act, we'd probably bust them because of their outright misrepresentations," Miller told IowaPolitics.com. "This report is riddled with misrepresentations and omissions of important facts."

Widespread economic uncertainty and the possibility of another recession led a state panel on October 14 to adjust Iowa's projected state revenue downward slightly for the current fiscal year.

The panel, however, still is predicting slight growth over last year.

The Revenue Estimating Conference (REC), a three-member panel that makes the state's official prediction of state revenue, lowered the Fiscal Year 2012 estimate to $5.97 billion, which is $17.5 million less than the panel's projection in March. The new estimate paces growth at 1.3 percent, or $75.9 million, from last fiscal year.