Wednesday February 15, 2012

Last Friday, as I expected, the licensed lender bill, H. 565, passed the House on a voice vote. Yesterday the Senate passed the child support enforcement bill, S. 203. Because of legislative rules, bills must “lay over” one day before they are introduced into the other chamber. So tomorrow when the Senate next convenes, H. 565 will be introduced. I expect it will be committed to the Finance Committee which, by the way, is chaired by Realtor Ann Cummings. Hopefully this bill will move quickly; and, remember, it will take effect upon passage. Stay tuned.
Also, I would expect S. 203 to end up in the House Judiciary Committee sometime Thursday. House Ways and Means continues to work on the net property tax issue with disclosures to lawyers, bankers, escrow agents and some others. Everyone i seeking a solution to the Supreme Court’s decision and I expect one will be found.
Yesterday the Chief Justice along with Justice Dooley and Court Administrator Bob Greemore made a lengthy and detailed presentation to the House Appropriations Committee on their budget request for FY 13. The court is in substantial agreement with the administration’s recommend but is asking for $400,000 in additional money. Here’s why. The “pay act” (a separate bill form the general appropriations bill which covers salaries) will contain a 3% increase for state employees. This will allow the judiciary to “buy back” 8 of the 12 furlough days we’ve lived with for the past few years. The add on 400,000 will pay for the last four. If the legislature approves the request and the governor signs the bill, furloughs will be over.
Justice Dooley explained the impact of furloughs to the committee after distributing caseload statistics that showed, in short, that caseloads are dropping while backlogs are increasing. Why? Well with 31 sitting trial judges, losing a day a month means that over the year we are actually losing the services of 1.5 judges for the year. Interesting calculation and result. It seemed to convince the committee. He also spent some time discussing the IT issues the court is facing. Those problems are in the court’s hardware and in the developing of the case management system. Because the developer of the system has not delivered as to expectations the court has held back some payments while it tries to work things out. He did say he doesn’t want the judiciary to end up where DMV is! So, in short, the system will not be in place by the 3 year deadline and it will cost more than planned. For anyone that has done technology upgrades, neither of these should be surprising.
The rest of this week contains more work on H. 600, the foreclosure mediation bill; H. 272, private roads; and some prep work for next week when the Senate Natural Resources Committee returns to work on H. 513, the environmental court/on the record appeal bill. It seems that energy disclosure and conservation easements are on hold right now; there’s no action scheduled on either right now. But things change fast. Now is the time to be vigilant as the crossover deadline approaches.
Thanks for reading.