Legislation

The Legislature has been busy these last couple of days, as they are planning to take the week off for Spring Break. We saw some movement on bills related to ATRS, and one bill that is now law.

The Governor's bill on investments in China, HB1352, passed the House and is now in the Senate State Agencies Committee. When they return after Spring Break, the Committee may initially focus on getting Senate bills passed out of the Committee. So, it won't surprise me if there is no action on HB1352 for the next couple of weeks.

I mentioned last week that HB1365, which would remove the requirement that ATRS and other boards and commissions have minority members, had passed the House and gone over to the Senate, but was then recalled back to the House. We now know what happened. One section of the bill amends a law that was an initiated act approved by the voters, and that means the bill needed a super-majority to pass. But when the House voted, only 61 representatives voted in favor, which is short of a super-majority. Unfortunately the legislative staff did not catch the super-majority requirement and so they mistakenly marked the bill as passed. So, the House has now expunged that vote. The sponsor will either run it again to try and get enough votes for a super-majority, or she will amend it to remove that one section. Either way, it should not change the bill's impact on ATRS.

The Governor has now signed into law HB1347 which would allow ATRS to make payments to Special Needs Trusts set up on behalf of members' beneficiaries. We will add this to our list of 2025 Acts to be implemented by ATRS. Also, the Joint Public Retirement Committee met on Tuesday, but none of the bills they considered would impact ATRS.

Since the Legislature is taking next week off, I will not be sending out an update next week. The House and Senate will reconvene on Monday, March 31, and I will send my next update email on Friday, April 4.

In the meantime, if you have questions about how a bill may impact ATRS, please reach out to me at the email address or phone number below. Also, if you are receiving this email as a forward and would like to be added to the distribution list, you can subscribe to these legislative updates here.

Mark White
ATRS Executive Director
MarkW@artrs.gov
Office: (501) 621-8853
Cell: (501) 541-2057