Weekly Recap - Week 4
We have now completed the first four weeks of this year's session. There have been a total of 477 House and Senate bills and another 31 commendations and resolutions. Committees have been hearing four to six bills per meeting, and on the Senate floor, we will be working our way through ten to twenty bills a day now. There have not been many talkers in the Senate to this point, but they will be coming. We have been dealing with a lot of bills from state agencies that are called clean up bills. Clean up bills remove old and outdated references to codes, sometimes the language is referencing a statute that has been repealed, or sometimes it changes the language in the statute to reflect the way we speak today.
Two bills that I am prime sponsor of in the Senate have had their committee hearing, and I will give a brief update on how they faired and their status.
SB 92 An Act to require that certain proposed rules include a housing cost impact statement was passed out of committee without any nay votes and placed on the consent calendar. SB 92 would require a state agency, when implementing a new rule or code change, to secure three different bids/quotes as to what the cost will be due to the rule change. It is modeled after a current state statute that requires a small business impact statement.
SB 149 An Act to revise an appropriation regarding the fire insurance premium tax was passed out of Senate Taxation without any nay votes. Then, it was sent to the committee on Joint Appropriations with a do pass recommendation. The reason that happened is because SB 149 spends dollars from the general fund. SB 149 would direct ten percent of the revenue from the fire insurance premium tax to the South Dakota Fire Fighters Association to pay for state fire school and training. The ten percent would equal a sum of $130,000. Currently, the association receives $30,000 from the fire premium tax. That amount has been set in statute since 1995 and has gone unchanged since. We all know that costs have increased over the last fifteen years and those funds do not go as far as they did in 1995. SB 149 will not increase any tax but redirects more of the funds to the South Dakota State Firefighters Association.
The House and Senate will be hearing from the Governor this week, and we will be receiving some budget numbers from her office. As we start to nail down our budget numbers, I will include some of that information in my upcoming articles. Please contact me with your comments and concerns at herman.otten@sdlegislature.gov