Talks with Beebe focus on taxes, Medicaid

— Cutting taxes and expanding health care to the poor may go hand in hand this session, legislative leaders and the governor said Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, the 65th day of the 2013 legislative session, lawmakers considered bills to allow victims’ families to watch executions, and to keep the governor from restricting access to guns during an emergency.

Some Arkansas legislative leaders met with Gov. Mike Beebe on Monday night and late Tuesday morning.

Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, said Beebe gave members present at Monday’s meeting a line-by-line description of why he proposed the budget he gave lawmakers last fall.

Collins said members are trying to consider all the moving pieces that could affect the state budget.

“To me it’s a Rubik’s cube. It’s not necessarily quid pro quo, it’s not like, if you do this, I’ll do that,” Collins said. “It’s more ‘How do all the pieces fit together?’”

Members have asked that a tax-cut package includes some income-tax cuts, a reduction in the sales tax on energy used by manufacturers and a state income-tax exemption for members of the armed forces, though they haven’t settled on specifics and how much would be cut.

Beebe has proposed a general-revenue budget of $4.947 billion in fiscal 2014, including $10 million in rainy-day funds, up from the current budget of $4.727 billion in fiscal 2013. He has not proposed any tax cuts in fiscal 2014.

Republican leaders have suggested a $100 million to $150 million tax-reduction package.

Senate President Pro Tempore Michael Lamoureux, R-Russellville, said Beebe wants lawmakers to identify the cuts they would make in the governor’s proposed budget to pay for tax cuts.

The governor hasn’t indicated how much in tax cuts that he would be comfortable with, Lamoureux said.

“I think he is hesitant to do that because he really wishes the number [of tax cuts] was zero, but I think he realizes it is going to be more than zero so he is saying as you move toward this just be responsible and make sure the cuts are something you can justify,” he said.

Beebe told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette there’ll be extra money for tax cuts if the Legislature agrees to add tens of thousands of Arkansans to the Medicaid rolls, a move that would trigger increases in federal funding. Cutting state spending by tens of millions of dollars to free up money for tax cuts would be more challenging, he said.

On Monday, a report from consultants hired by the state Department of Human Services showed that expanding the state Medicaid program to 250,000 poor Arkansans through private health insurance would cost less than expected. Legislators call it the “private option.”

The report estimated that by 2015, expanding access through the private option will have cost at most $130 million more than if the state had added those people to the existing Medicaid program.

Without expansion, Arkansas’ Medicaid program faces a $61 million deficit next fiscal year, but with expansion, and the federal funds it will bring, Arkansas would see a $28 million surplus, it found.

“What we do know is that if they do pass Medicaid expansion, it frees up some money to help pay for some of these tax cuts they are talking about,” Beebe said. “If you really want to pay for some tax cuts without hurting some people, the most feasible way to do that is Medicaid expansion.”

Lamoureux said the governor has “not exactly” linked the private option and tax cuts.

“But I think it is a fair point that there has been a lot of talk about the economic activity that the private option would generate,” Lamoureux said. “The tax cuts would be easier to budget … if we have that complete.”

House Speaker Davy Carter, R-Cabot, said it’s best to address tax cuts and Medicaid expansion together.

“The preference would be to deal with both of these things at the same time. Whether they are mutually exclusive, I don’t know I would go that far,” Carter said.

MEDICAID-EXPANSION BILL

Carter said he wants to see written legislation on expanding health care by Friday.

“Let’s see something on paper and put all of the ideas that are floating around on paper by the end of the week,” Carter said. “Until it’s on paper, it’s really hard to sit down and have a debate about it and to further progress the discussion.”

The session is scheduled to end April 19.

He said expansion would likely require an appropriations bill to authorize spending money and a regular bill to put the expansion into law.

Lamoureux said he believes the Legislature will approve a private option with at least a three-quarters vote in the House and Senate.

“I think it’s difficult, I think obviously it depends on what it looks like, but I also think that we’ll get something done,” he said.

STEEL MILL

Carter said lawmakers will take up the proposed Big River Steel mill project in a Joint Agriculture Committee meeting Monday afternoon.

Carter said there “weren’t any surprises” in the reports legislators received from two consulting firms hired to review the project.

To bring the $1.1 billion steel mill to Osceola, legislators will first need to authorize $125 million in bonds.

Under Amendment 82, passed in 2004, the Legislature may authorize general-obligation bonds to finance infrastructure or other needs to attract large economic-development projects.

LIMITING GUNS

The House of Representatives voted 78-9 in favor of a bill that would remove the governor’s ability to suspend or limit the sale, dispensing or transportation of firearms during an a disaster emergency. The provision has been on the books since 1973.

Rep. Charlotte Douglas, R-Alma, said she was approached by the National Rifle Association to sponsor House Bill 1819.

The bill does not address the governor’s other disasteremergency powers, including suspending or limiting the sale, dispensing or transporting alcoholic beverages, explosives or combustibles.

FETAL PERSONHOOD

The House also passed 76-10 a bill that would extend the definition of unborn child in the criminal code to cover “offspring of human beings from conception until birth.”

Rep. Nate Steel, D-Nashville, said Senate Bill 417, proposed by Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, makes a “very minor change to the law” that currently defines an unborn child as a living fetus of 12 weeks or longer gestation.

Under current law, Steel said doctors sometimes disagree about the age of a fetus during trial and the bill would cover a fetus during any stage of development.

BOARD OF APPORTIONMENT

The Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee endorsed a bill to require the state Board of Apportionment, which redraws legislative districts, to explain in a written report the reasoning for each boundary change.

Senate Bill 959 by Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, would require the board to file the report with the Senate president pro tempore and House speaker within 15 days of filing its redistricting plan with the secretary of state.

The board is made up of the governor, attorney general and secretary of state and redraws legislative district boundaries every 10 years.

King said districts created by the board in 2011 “really didn’t make sense,” sometimes placed two House incumbents in the same district, and split the town of Alpena into three Senate districts.

$500,000 AWARD REVIEW

At the request of state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, R-LittleRock, the Joint Budget Committee referred its Claims Review Subcommittee’s recommendation to reduce a $1.5 million award by the state Claims Commission to $500,000 to the subcommittee for further consideration.

The award is to the family of Maurice “Beau” Clark.

Hutchinson told reporters that “it seems a little odd to have reduced an amount that the Claims Commission had already awarded [and] it’s an unusual practice.”

He said he wants the subcommittee to review its recommendation and why it made the recommendation, and have more members vote on it.

The subcommittee last week approved the Claims Commission’s findings that the Department of Human Services’ Youth Services Division was liable in the death of Clark, 67, who was shot and killed by 16-year-old Antonio Terry on June 30, 2009.

Little Rock attorney David Williams, who represented Clark’s family in the case, has said Terry was released from Youth Services Division custody two months before Clark was killed, despite the objections of several staff members.

Breck Hopkins, chief counsel for the Human Services Department, has countered that the department should not be held liable because “in legal terms, this was not a foreseeable event.” Terry had been sent to a juvenile-detention center for burglary and theft, but he was released after about three months.

DEATH-PENALTY WITNESS

The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would allow the family members of murder victims to attend the killer’s execution.

Senate Bill 52, proposed by Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, would allow a spouse, any parent or stepparent, any adult sibling or step-sibling, and any adult child or stepchild who is related to the homicide victim to attend the execution.

Under current law, family members of the victims are allowed to watch an execution over closed-circuit television.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/20/2013

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