After being AWOL much of the last two days of the regular session, House Ways and Means chairman Neil Abramson had some explaining to do about the failure to pass the Capital Outlay bill on Monday.
All he would say to the full House then was, “The legal and technical issues did not allow this to be fixed, and did not allow this to be fixed in conference committee.”
But when he got before his own committee Tuesday, Abramson was more forthcoming. Of course, he was asking for their support on the new versions of the state construction bills.
He said part of the problem was the need to pass HB 3, known as the Omnibus Bond bill, in tandem with HB 2.
“If we had passed HB 2 along with HB 3 in the regular session, and came back and did the clean-up, that meant we would have to pass a second HB 3 in this session to go along with the clean-up HB 2,” Abramson explained. “We would then have ended up with two HB 3 bond bills.” He said two versions of the bond bill created the potential problem.
“The advice I received was that created some very, very serious risk of invalidating the bonds.”
The committee chair went on to explain one of the “technical issues”, too.
“One of the other issues with House Bill 2 from the regular session was a language amendment added by the Senate,” Abramson said. “The staff and everyone else has said you cannot have language amendments in an appropriation bill.”
In order to solve that problem, Abramson has created a third bill as part of the capital outlay process. HB 52 simply deals with language guiding the construction projects.
Monroe Rep. Jay Morris had the chance to question the state director of Facilities Planning, Mark Moses, about that.
“Is this language in House Bill 2 every year?” Morris inquired.
“Yes, sir,” Moses replied.
“It is?” Morris asked, for confirmation.
“Yes,” Moses said.
The committee approved all three bills without objection, sending them straight to the House floor.