The Republican-controlled state Legislature will convene this afternoon in a special session aimed at addressing the state’s financially strapped health-insurance plan for public-school employees.
Gov. Mike Beebe issued a proclamation Wednesday afternoon summoning lawmakers to Little Rock.
Legislative leaders said they hope to complete their business by sometime Saturday.
The governor said he called the session after Senate leaders advised his office late Tuesday that they had secured the support of 29 senators for proposed legislation to use $43 million in surplus state funds to subsidize the health-insurance plan.
If the $43 million state subsidy is approved, thousands of public-school employees will see premium increases of roughly 10 percent, beginning Jan. 1. Without the state bailout, the premiums will increase by about 50 percent, state officials said.
It will take a three fourths vote in the House and the Senate to pass the aid package.
Twenty-seven votes are required in the Senate, which has 34 senators and one vacancy. Seventy-five of the 100 House members also must approval the proposal.
Beebe told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the proposal had 77 votes in the House, but was a few votes short in the Senate. But that evening, around 10 p.m., Senate leaders sent word that they’d secured enough support to pass the legislation.
Beebe said Wednesday that he wouldn’t be issuing this call for a special session “if we hadn’t already seen extraordinary bipartisan efforts to help our teachers and other public-school employees in Arkansas.
“After dozens of meetings with legislators, district officials, teachers and other involved parties, we have a solution that may not please every individual group, but will help alleviate the spike in insurance rates and shore up this insurance program,” he said in a prepared statement.
Beginning in 2015, money earmarked for other education-related expenses will be reallocated to cover health-insurance costs.
Legislative leaders said they plan to reallocate roughly $36 million per year, earmarking it for insurance costs. Much of that money would otherwise be spent on teacher professional development and school-building construction.
They also said they want to enact a measure reallocating several million dollars in property-tax revenue from eight better-off school districts to cover the state’s school building needs. Supporters want to phase the reallocation in over a three year period, starting in the 2015-16 school year, although lawmakers who represent the legislative districts in which these eight school districts are located are vowing to kill the legislation.
The eight school districts are Armorel, Eureka Springs, Fountain Lake, Mineral Springs, Nemo Vista, South Side, Quitman and West Side, according to a spokesman for the state Department of Education.
Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, said she is “adamantly opposed” to the measure seizing the districts’ property-tax revenue.
“If the bill passes, it will land the state of Arkansas back in court,” she warned.
The proposed legislation comes nearly a year after the Arkansas Supreme Court narrowly ruled in November that the state cannot keep funds raised by districts in areas with high property values.
Beebe, a critic of the court’s ruling, said Wednesday that he’s been advised that a majority of the House and Senate favor the proposed reallocation of property-tax revenue.
But, he said, “I never held out that the [proposed legislation] had to be there for us to call a session.”
Legislative leaders said they also want to consider legislation to create a legislative task force to study and improve the state’s health-insurance plans for public-school and state employees.
Beebe’s proclamation for the special session allows the Legislature to consider enacting these measures as well as a bill to repeal Act 954 of 2013, which was enacted by the Legislature over the objections of the state Department of Environmental Quality.
Senate President Pro Tempore Michael Lamoureux, R-Russellville, said Wednesday that he had doubted that there would be enough votes to pass the health-insurance subsidy.
But, he said, Senate Education Committee Chairman Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home, and Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, “somehow got it worked out” to secure the support of several senators, including Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs.
“I will be a ‘yes,’” said Hester.
“We all want to fix teachers’ health insurance, and we want some type of reform,” he said.
Dismang said several senators were worried about whether the proposed legislative task force on the health-insurance plans would have “enough teeth to be successful.”
Key said the task force would issue recommendations by June, in time to craft legislation for the 2015 regular legislative session.
He said several senators “wanted to see … legislative intent [in the proposal for the task force] that says we are not going to continue to bail out the system [and] reforms are going to have to take place and, if they don’t take place, these [long-term] funding streams that we are putting there, we are going to pull those back down the road.
“It is not putting the heat on anybody but us as a General Assembly to make sure that happens,” Key said.
Dismang and Key declined to disclose which senators said they would support the $43 million transfer of surplus funds to the health-insurance plan, after Dismang and Key agreed to make changes to the proposed legislation creating the legislative task force.
Sens. Bryan King, R-Green Forest; Cecile Bledsoe, R-Rogers; and Irvin said they haven’t decided how they’ll vote on the surplus-funds issue.
Under the rates approved in August by the State and Public School Life and Health Insurance Board, premiums for the most expensive and popular plan for individual school employees would increase to a maximum of $336 a month, up from $226.70 this year. A 10 percent premium increase would boost the cost to about $249.37 a month, according to Bob Alexander, director of the state’s Employee Benefits Division.
The monthly premiums for family coverage under the most expensive and popular plan are expected to rise to about $1,528 in 2014, up from $1,029.96 this year, if the Legislature does nothing.
A 10 percent premium increase would boost the monthly cost of family coverage under this plan to about $1,133.96, according to Alexander.
Beebe said he added repealing Act 954 of 2013 to the call for the special session at the request of lawmakers.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality expressed concern over Act 954 as it moved through the Legislature earlier this year. Department Director Teresa Marks testified at committee meetings that the measure would be seen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as violating the Clean Water Act.
The law alters how the department monitors mineral discharges, and it removes the default drinking-water designation for Arkansas waterways.
In August, the EPA put a hold on 14 pollutant-discharge permits issued by the state under Act 954. The conditions of the permit were not consistent with the minimum requirements under the Clean Water Act, the federal regulators said.
The department was to receive an EPA “formal objection” to the permits in mid-November and would then have 90 days to address the problems. Otherwise, the federal regulators would take over the program.
But Marks had said the department was bound by state laws, including Act 954, when issuing the permits and could not make changes in the permits without a repeal of the law.
Marks said in an interview Wednesday that she had been in talks with the governor’s office on how to respond to the EPA’s objections.
Marks said she was pleased that the Legislature is going to take up the measure and hopes that the repeal will pass.
“We want to get our permits back, and we want to keep that regulation on the state level where it belongs,” Marks said.
Rep. Andy Davis, R-Little Rock, who sponsored the original legislation, said he now supports a repeal of the law because of the EPA’s response. He said the original impetus of the measure, to give relief to the state’s industries and municipalities, was not realized.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/17/2013