Will try again on HB1201 tomorrow

HB1201 seeks to assist participants in the Arkansas Retired Teachers Association with their group health insurance premiums. Retired teachers are currently spending close to half of their retirement benefits towards premiums, and this legislation seeks to address that issue. I presented this yesterday morning in Joint Retirement (getting a quorum on Monday mornings is pretty difficult), and the bill failed due to two dissenting votes from Reps. Garner and Burkes.

The funding companion to this legislation, HB2090, was voted out of the House yesterday. This project has a fiscal impact of $13.7MM for the first year of the next biennium and $15MM for every year thereafter. Even with passage, this is likely to be fully or partially unfunded since it's not in the governor's proposed balanced budget. The last time we chipped in $35MM, we were not given Lake View credit for it. Regardless, I do not want to think where this state would be without our retired teachers' lifelong commitment to the children of Arkansas. We could at least show a little appreciation by contributing the same amount to their health insurance premium as we do for their retired state employee counterparts.

Here's the roll call vote on yesterday's vote on HB2090: