Week 4

March 28 - April 1

This week’s update is a bit delayed. I took Friday off with my wife to visit her parents in South Carolina. It was their first time to meet the Legislative Delegation’s official mascot, Roscoe. Roscoe was rescued from the Wal-Mart parking lot over a year ago and spent many of his first days here at the County Services Building. We all had a great weekend, including Roscoe. I also want to mention that last week, Governor Bentley signed a Resolution declaring April ‘Autism Awareness Month.’ There will be many great opportunities around the state this month to help raise money to aid those affected by Autism.

The week started in the House with some all important housekeeping. Each legislative session the legislature is responsible for passing Sunset Bills. The Sunset Bills are a requirement each session that keeps many oversight boards for state agencies current under state law. The Sunset Committee makes its recommendations for these boards to be renewed and the House must vote on whether or not to concur. There were 17 of these passed early last week.

There were also a few other bills of note that should be mentioned. The week was ended in the House of Representatives by passing Representative Jim McClendon’s bill to ban texting while driving. Even though there was some debate on the House floor, the bill passed almost unanimously in the end. This bill has passed the House in years past only to see it die in the Senate. However, whether we make this a law or not, we should all no better than to text while driving. It’s just not safe.

The House also continued to make our state government more transparent. Representative Paul DeMarco passed HB25 out of the House that will require the state to publish its financial records on the Finance Departments website. This bill overwhelming passed with a vote of 97-0.

We have been paying close attention to freshman Representative, April Weaver and HB61 that will aid small businesses in Alabama. Her bill passed through Senate committee this past week and she hopes it will be taken up on the Senate floor this coming week.

In the Senate, there were several very important public hearings this past week. One of those was on Sentencing Reform due the overcrowding in our State Prisons. This is something that Senator Cam Ward and the rest of a joint house committee has been tasked with trying to reform. It’s a tough task, but something that must be done.

The Forever Wild legislation that I have received so many phone calls about was voted through in Senate committee this week. The vote of 5-3 pushes the legislation along that will extend the Forever Wild Program for another year.

We have seen a lot of legislation passed so far during this legislative session. For the most part, they have worked on one bill a day and worked hard on each to get them passed. It will be interesting to see where the rest of the session takes us.