Last Wednesday was Joint Rule 10 Day, a deadline in the State House for joint (House-Senate) committees to take action on all the timely-filed bills in their purview.
For many bills, that’s simply an extension, i.e., a new deadline. But some bills did get out of committee. Here are a few that we were especially happy to see:
- Common Start Bill (Lightly Redrafted as S.2619), which would establish a framework for delivering increased access to affordable, high-quality early education and child care with greater investment in providers, better pay for workers, and a cap on costs for families
- Full Spectrum Pregnancy Care Bill (S.646 / H.1137), which would ensure health coverage for prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum care, without any cost-sharing
- Overdose Prevention Centers (S.1242 / H.1981), which create a ten-year pilot programs for overdose prevention centers that use harm reduction strategies to address the opioid crisis
- Access to Counsel (S.864 / H.1731), which would guarantee legal representation for low-income tenants and owner-occupants in eviction proceedings
- Healthy Youth Act (S.268 / H.544), which would require school districts that provide sex education to ensure that it is comprehensive, age-appropriate, and LGBTQ-inclusive, with an emphasis on consent
- Language Access Bill (S.1990 / H.3084), which would build the capacity of key public-facing state agencies to meet the language access needs of an increasingly diverse population by standardizing and enforcing language access protocols and practices
- Facial Surveillance Regulations (Lightly Redrafted as H.4359), which would implement the recommendations of the commission created by the 2020 police reform bill to create a tight regulatory framework for facial surveillance
- Gas Moratorium (S.2135), which would pause the approval for any new or expanded gas infrastructure through 2026
- Sunlight Bill (S.1963), which would promote transparency in state government by removing the Governor’s exemption from public records law and requiring committee votes and legislative testimony (with appropriate redactions) to be public
Most bills received extensions to a later date: in other words, the committee will have a new deadline for action. See a list of new deadlines here.
Some bills we care about, unfortunately, were “sent to study,” a polite way of voting down a bill. Bills that are sent to study do not advance in a given session outside of extremely rare circumstances, but the campaigns can still continue and build for the next legislative session. Among those sent to study were
- Make Polluters Pay, which require fossil-fuel producers to fund the state’s climate adaptation programs based on past emissions, a proposal that would extend the long-standing “polluter pays” principle for toxic waste cleanups to addressing climate change
- Prison Moratorium (House bill only), which would enact a five-year pause on new prison and jail construction in order to provide time to develop more effective, community-based approaches to public safety (The Senate bill received an extension.)
- Same Day Registration
- Ranked choice voting local option bill
- All-resident voting local option bill
- Vote16 local option bill
