Uncertainty surrounding a newly created $60-million tax-relief fund and few safeguards on how the state taxpayer dollars will be used opens up the potential for misuse, state lawmakers say.

House Ways & Means Chair Tom Sands (R-Wapello) told IowaPolitics.com last month that among 100 Iowa House members, 50 Iowa Senate members and the governor, there are probably 151 different ideas on how to use the $60 million that will go into the Taxpayers Trust Fund this year.

I've been pretty rough on Secretary of State Jesse White lately. I have no regrets about it, and I believe I had good reason to put the onus on him to correct his mistake of appointing state Representative Derrick Smith to the Illinois House last year. Smith, of course, was arrested in March on federal bribery charges.

White requested a sit-down last week, and I was more than happy to meet with him. I've always respected the guy, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I stood by everything I wrote and will continue to hold him responsible for resolving this mess.

White initially blamed his alderman and protégé Walter Burnett for Smith's appointment. Burnett, White said, didn't fully inform him about Smith's background problems. (Smith was fired from his city job, and the Sun-Times reported a few years ago that he'd been accused of malfeasance.) That's no excuse, however. White is the top dog, and the blame rests with him. He agreed.

It's hard to avoid contemplating how Secretary of State Jesse White has screwed up lately on so many fronts.

White has managed to mostly avoid scandals throughout his life and as a result has become one of the most popular Democratic politicians of the past half-century - one year winning all 102 Illinois counties, and then still taking about 70 percent of the vote during the the national Republican landslide of 2010. (Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan won with 65 percent, and Governor Pat Quinn won with less than 47 percent that same year.)

But White's engineering of the appointment of Derrick Smith to his old House seat was no doubt the biggest mistake the secretary has ever made in his decades-long political career.

The chair of one of Iowa's powerful tax-writing committees said March 19 that allowing certain local projects to keep their own sales-tax revenue - rather than sending the money to the state - is a slippery slope.

"I think it's a very dangerous road to go down," Iowa House Ways & Means Chair Tom Sands (R-Wapello), told IowaPolitics.com. "The state started down that road just a little bit with the racetrack, and now, here are two other proposals that are coming off of that. So the next question is: Where will this end?"

In 2005, lawmakers and the governor first used this economic-development tool to bring NASCAR to Iowa. Then-Governor Tom Vilsack signed a law that paved the way for construction of the Iowa Speedway in Newton by allowing the racetrack to keep $12.5 million of its own future sales-tax revenue.

An Iowa policy group warned then that the Newton project would encourage other cities to seek similar subsidies from state funds. The group, it appears, was right.