Ken Lavine, Staff Director, Sunset Commission
- Currently pursuing staff evaluations by the agencies
- Have begun to focus down on highest risk areas for staff reviews
- The middle of May will see the first set of staff reports published
- There will be a public hearing about a month after staff reports in order for stakeholders to bring more information forward
- During the summer the committee will vote on the first set of reports and those decisions will be drafted into bills
- Staff will work as an extension of the committee during the session; attempting to inform members about the bills and do whatever needs to be done to get the bills where they need to be
- Rep. Richard Raymond asked if there would be enough time after getting staff reports to be able to tweak them before the public hearing
- If there are issues that any member would like to see in reports they need to be brought up as soon as possible; staff is currently focusing on certain areas and can broaden their scope if necessary
- The committee’s organizational document, committee budget and rules were adopted.
- The committee directed legislative counsel to identify references in statute for each agency up for sunset that do not use first person language when referencing persons with disabilities
- Once identified, sunset staff can begin drafting replacement language
- Chairman Jane Nelson noted that codes governing health and human services agencies need cleaning up because of obsolete, duplicative and conflicting references; the committee should direct staff to create draft legislation of a code revision
- Rep. Cindy Burkett asked if drafted legislation will show changes so the committee can determine if the appropriate change has been made
- Steven Ogle, sunset staff counsel, noted that one page will show current language and another page will show the changes and the reasoning; currently, the code is extremely confusing and it is hard to determine who should be doing what and who has what authority; in the revision, staff will work with the agencies to determine who is doing what function and whether the function is still in existence post HB 2292, 78R
- Burkett asked if what is currently in effect is the agencies’ interpretation of what HB 2292 was intended to do
- That is correct
- Rep. Harold Dutton asked if revisions will conflict with changes made in HB 2292 in trying to clear up the responsibilities
- Lavine replied that if staff sees something that is in practice now as a result of HB 2292 that doesn’t work well, staff will be making those recommendations independently of the revision project; hopefully the revision bill will move through quickly and sunset bills can build off of it
- Raymond noted that many services provided by the HHS enterprise are confusing and it is sometimes hard to determine where programs are coming from such as the Women’s Health Program
- Nelson hopes that sunset will help to ensure that the agencies and their programs are as streamlined as possible
- Sen. Charles Schwertner noted there is concern that the revision bill could be used by the agencies to revise their legislative mandate inconsistently with HB 2292
- Lavine noted he has received instruction from the chair not to let that happen; it will be clear that if someone is trying to make a substantive change, it is not going to go in the cleanup bill
- The committee directed sunset staff and legislative council to begin identifying such references and to provide draft legislation to update them
The committee will have their next meeting the week of June 23-27, it will be a two day meeting.
The following meeting will be held the week of August 11-15.