Along with the State of the State Address, Wednesday January 10th also saw the beginning of the 2007 Legislative session. While many bills based on various other initiatives remain to be considered, several of those mentioned in the governor’s speech have been heard on the floor and taken up by committee in the past week.
The address began by recalling the Sago Mine disaster of a year ago and all the lessons learned by the state, including the reality that coal mine and miner safety needs to be improved. According to the Senate President’s inaugural speech, West Virginia must still move forward with its energy future in a way that will also protect our unique environment while still bringing new jobs to the state. To start, the Senate has before it now Senate Bill 68 which would expand the authority of the Director of the Office of Miner’s Health, Safety and Training to deal more effectively with mines in violation of safety regulations.
Over the next eight weeks the Legislature will consider a budget that allows almost 45 percent of the total recommended appropriations, comprising over $1.8 billion, to be allocated to public education. This money will go toward, among other things, improving technology in the classroom as well as the general environment to see that West Virginia students are equipped with the best materials to ensure a productive learning experience.
And in a more inclusive sense, there will be a marked effort starting now and proceeding into this and future sessions to make West Virginia contemporary technologically to the point of allowing it to compete not only on the national level but also with the rest of the world. To accomplish this objective, and in keeping with Speaker Thompson’s charge to put people’s interest over special interest, the state will be expanding its broadband Internet access in hopes of affording all residents the service by 2010. According to economic development experts, this is an important part of the state’s infrastructure. This concept is evident already in Senate Bill 69, or the e-prescriptions bill, currently under consideration. This bill would allow patient prescriptions, refill orders and other pertinent information to be submitted by a physician to a pharmacy through an Internet connection. The intention is to save money in vertical integration (from health care providers down to the patients themselves) and reduce error rates so that there are no impediments upon the filling of any order.
In picking up on the growing unease surrounding the employment of unauthorized workers, the Legislature has before it now a bill that would increase the penalty for these transgressions. Among its provisions, Senate Bill 70 would make it so a board or commission shall issue a cease and desist order requiring a contractor to terminate all operations at the work site where the violation occurred.
To continue with the special session held in November of last year, in which the Legislature passed several bills designed to update West Virginia’s tax code, several other bills have been introduced already which deal with tax modernization. Revisiting an issue that was addressed specifically during that session, House Bill 2122 seeks to eliminate the tax on foods not consumed on the premises of where they were purchased. Further, House Bill 2057 would reduce the corporate net income tax rate to eight percent and gradually lessen that rate to six percent over the next four years in an attempt to bring West Virginia up to current practices in other states.
For additional information regarding these or other issues, please visit our website at https://www.wvlegislature.gov
