Legislators receiving bills to look at

After leadership canceled all bills last week, we are now receiving bills in committee this week. With the 3-day public notice required for bill hearings, week two was also a bit slow. For some reason, a bill I had scheduled for week one has been referred to another committee. It is always interesting; the predictable is not always predictable. However, one always predictable thing that did happen was the first bills introduced coming from the work done during interim committees. Most are pre-filed before session start and are typically language correction, updating antiquated language, or bills to correct spelling errors. These issues at times have interesting discussions and at times have no discussion at all.

The Appropriation Subcommittee Section B I was placed on is responsible for Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS) finances. This past week has been an introduction to all of the parts and pieces involved in the agency. The amount of data that each Division is required to keep track of for the federal government, state government and inter-agency coordination is astronomical. At present, we are working on Medicaid, Medicare, and the renewal of the expansion part. There is a real learning curve to this committee, as legislative services takes information from the agency for their budget request and compares it to the Governor’s budget. In the end, all this and all the subcommittees come together to balance the budget.

House Bill 1, the feed bill, or legislative operating budget for the session came from the House to the Senate. There was an proposed amendment to add $320,000+ to the partisan staff budget. Being as there is $1.4 million for that purpose already, I voted against adding that amount more money to add more staff.

As for me, I have written these articles for the past four sessions myself, with a bit of editing help. Granted, there is a lot of other work that has to be done, and some legislators do use staff for articles. But I feel it’s important for constituents in District 14 to hear from me directly, and also that staff have more important work to do.

Judy and I did take in the State of the State address by the Governor. As always, I agreed with most of our Republican Governor’s thoughts. We as individual legislators and as members of caucuses can all agree some of the time, but never all of the time. That is the good part of our democratic system.

In the past, I have asked you to include your town or county in the subject line of an email. This distinction helps me make sure the emails don’t get filtered out as spam. I look at my email as often as possible.

As always, stay safe!

——

Montana Sen. Russ Tempel, R-Chester, can be emailed at Sen. [email protected] .