BENTONVILLE -- The state's fiscal sessions were supposed to concentrate strictly on budget issues, but the previously obscure Special Language Subcommittee of the Joint Budget Committee has become an avenue around that, Benton County lawmakers said Saturday.
"You really can't expect good legislation to come out of one committee with 14 members," said Rep. Duncan Baird, House chairman of the Joint Budget Committee at a legislative forum hosted by the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce.
The legislature has a committee structure precisely so issues can get detailed examination by lawmakers familiar with the appropriate topic, he said. That's what happens in regular legislative sessions.
Regular sessions begin in January of odd-numbered years. Fiscal sessions begin in February of even-numbered years.
The Special Language Committee adds wording to budget bills, usually to make it clear what the money appropriated within those bills is to be spent upon. In a regular session, this amounts to fine-tuning the work of other committees. However, the detail-writing role of Special Language makes the subcommittee the only one that can directly address almost any issue during a fiscal session, since non-budget items can only be brought up in a fiscal session by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.
The situation funnels a large variety of issues to the subcommittee, along with a lot of pressure to act on those issues, lawmakers said.
So far this session, the issues brought before the Special Language Subcommittee include health care reform and environmental laws over natural gas drilling or fracking, said committee member Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, who attended the forum at NorthWest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville.
"We debated a change in how $300 million -- $300 million -- on behavioral health providers is spent," Hendren said. "I'm on the Education Committee and the Transportation Committee. What do I know about behavioral health providers?"
"We debated Common Core," a set of public education standards, Hendren said. "We gave that an hour's debate, spread over two meetings."
Voters approved a state constitutional amendment in the 2008 election, adding the fiscal session. The first was in 2010.
The first two fiscal sessions did focus on budget issues, Baird said. This led lawmakers to believe the fiscal sessions would work as intended, he said. This fiscal session didn't follow the pattern, he said. "We are going to have a debate on what we want fiscal session to look like," he said.
Hendren agreed. "Once again, once we got to Little Rock we proved that we're really good at getting around things that we want to get around," he said.
Commentary on 02/23/2014