Administration

Legislation

95th Arkansas General Assembly - Regular Session 2025
The Regular Session of the 95th General Assembly convened on Monday, January 13, 2025 at 12:00 P.M.

To receive regular updates about legislation that impacts the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System you can subscribe to our legislative updates newsletter here.

ATRS Legislative Package Summary

Other Bills Affecting ATRS

ATRS Legislative Update: Week 1 (Jan. 13-17)

On Monday, the Arkansas Legislature gathered to open the 95th General Assembly, beginning with the swearing-in of members. On Tuesday, the Governor gave her State of the State Address to a joint session of the House and Senate. You can read her prepared remarks here.

JOINT PUBLIC RETIREMENT & SOCIAL SECURITY COMMITTEE


House Speaker Brian Evans announced Rep. Les Warren of Hot Springs will continue as House Co-Chair of the Joint Public Retirement & Social Security Committee. He also named Rep. Kendra Moore of Lincoln as the House Vice Chair. The Speaker also announced the other House members of the Committee. They include:

You can find the full House and Senate membership of the Committee, along with contact information for the members, here. We look forward to working with Reps. Warren and Moore and their other colleagues on the Committee in the coming weeks.

The Committee will hold its Organizational Meeting on Tuesday the 21st after the adjournment of the full House and Senate. We expect that Tuesday afternoon slot will be the Committee's regular meeting time each week.
 

ATRS LEGISLATIVE PACKAGE

The seven bills in the ATRS legislative package were all filed on Thursday. You can find a full list of the bills, along with summary descriptions of each bill, on our website here. Some of the bills will have a minimal cost to ATRS, while others will have no cost. Our actuaries do not expect these bills to have any negative impact on ATRS. And none of the bills will reduce or limit any member's benefits.

The Joint Budget Committee also filed SB 66, which is the appropriation bill that will fund ATRS for the next fiscal year. Everything in the bill is as we expected it to be, based on our budget hearing last fall. We will be monitoring for any attempted changes, but at this point I do not expect any problems with this bill.

As of Friday morning, no other bills directly affecting ATRS had been filed. We are monitoring each day's bill filings, and if any such bills are filed we will let you know.

If you have questions about how a bill may impact ATRS, or if you are concerned about something ATRS is proposing, 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