This week, almost 50 committees of conference met on House bills amended by the Senate and Senate bills amended by the House. The most important, of course, is the budget; Dan is working on that and they meet all day, every day, up to the deadline on Thursday at 4 pm.
I was assigned to three committees of conference. The first was on HB 776, adding wrong way driving to the list of aggravating factors for DUI; it had been amended to include SB 30, the state marsupial bill, which the Senate had killed once we attached another bill to it. Since I couldn’t support the House position on either, I was removed from the committee.
Next came HB 612, a perfectly innocuous bill to allow a person just turning 21 get an “adult” license before their birthday, as long as the physical card wasn’t delivered until after their birthday (youth licenses are oriented differently, so it’s easy to see that they’re not legal for drinking.) The Senate added two other bills: SB 169 and SB 198. SB 169 was a report to people out on workers’ compensation about cost sharing; the House Labor committee had received a great deal more testimony than the Senate and determined that this well-meaning bill was unenforceable and impossible to implement. It had been tabled, 313-19. SB 198 was service dog week, which I’d killed on the floor, 179-144. So, when the conference committee met, we started with the House position: pass the original bill and kill the add-ons. The Senators spoke in favor of their bills, then we reiterated our position. After a caucus, the Senate offered a compromise: service dog day. So we agreed to disagree and resubmit HB 612 again next year.
HB 148, which forbade local amendments to the state building code, had been amended in my committee to allow administrative amendments. The Senate, with help from some of us, added in the state fire code; when reviewing the amendment to decide to concur or not, we noticed that there were three references to 2024, making it an unconstitutional retroactive bill. When the conference committee met, we agreed to change all three 2024 dates to July 1, 2025, and nothing else. Since we had retained SB 94, which dealt with the same issues, any problems or concerns other than the dates could be addressed in that bill. So we had a 5 minute conference committee and went home!
The House and Senate actually reached a compromise on the budget – from the early reports, that wasn’t obvious. It is, as all budgets are, a conglomeration of good and bad ideas; from my point of view, it spends too much money and prioritizes the wrong spending. Still, I will vote for it. Among the good things: no new taxes; funding for universal education freedom accounts; and a complete repeal of car inspections!
The most complex issue, and one that’s gotten a lot of attention, is the Group II (police, fire, corrections) retirement changes. I worked with Dan on this, since I’ve been involved with pension legislation since 2009. The compromise plan cost half to a third as much as the Governor’s plan, while granting nearly all the same benefits. This plan gives the first responders everything they’ve been asking for since 2015 or so: retirement as young as 45; half-pay pension after 20 years; and pension calculated on three years of income rather than five. What it doesn’t give (and they never asked for, but obviously want) is the opportunity to manipulate or “spike” their pensions – there’s a limit of how much extra pay (from overtime, unspent vacation or sick time, or details worked) can be applied towards a pension. It’s the same as current law, but the governor’s plan had eliminated this limitation. The plan also has a hard cap of $125,000 or the average of the three highest years’ income. These limitations are what saved over $200 million of taxpayer money (mostly from property taxes!) while ensuring a respectable pension.
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