As a businessman, David Greenspon owns four buildings in the Des Moines metro area and says he pays more than $387,000 a year in property taxes.

"They're expensive," said Greenspon, president of Competitive Edge Inc. in Urbandale, which manufactures promotional products. "When you pay a lot of tax, somebody else is paying it. It's going to cost my customers; it's going to cost me profits that I could put into hiring people."

Greenspon said he loves Iowa and has been in business here for 29 years. But he said the high taxes discourage businesses from locating in Iowa when they can find lower taxes elsewhere.

Employees are also affected. Greenspon said he's had a "relatively tight control on wages" for the past three years and hasn't been able to give the kind of pay raises, profit-sharing, and 401(k) contributions that he would have liked.

"I've got 150-plus employees," he said. "If you take a quarter-million dollars and give it back to me, I would distribute a big chunk of that in bonus checks. They'd have more money to spend, and their lives would be better."

Governor Terry Branstad and the Iowa legislature on January 9 renewed efforts to overhaul the state's property-tax system. If they can do it, it will be the first time in more than 30 years that property taxes have been reformed in the Hawkeye State.

In a move intended to bring evangelical voters behind a single candidate, Iowa social-conservative leaders on December 20 endorsed former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

"I believe he is ready for a January 3 surprise," Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of the Family Leader - which opposes gay marriage and abortion - said of Santorum. "Hopefully, this gives him a stamp of credibility that some people are waiting for."

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.