General Assembly
10. H5529: Directs the Department of Children, Youth and Families to disclose findings of abuse at a “family day care home, group family day care home or day care center”, provided that no personal information is disclosed about anyone involved (House Judiciary, April 12). 9. H5498: Sets up the Obamacare “exchange” in Rhode Island (House…
Lots of very interesting bills are being heard by General Assembly committees in the upcoming week. I’ll put up the list in three separate posts; here’s part 1 or part 3, depending on your personal preference for numbering conventions… 17. H5310: Prohibits rental agreements from containing clauses that prohibit tenants from inviting contractors onto a…
10. H5830: Requires real estate commissions to be paid at the closing. (House Corporations, April 5) 9. H5575: From the official description: “This act would affirm the use in state legal proceedings of unsworn declarations made by declarations who are physically outside the boundaries of the United States when making the declaration”. (House Corporations, April…
Two interesting points are buried within Randal Edgar and Philip Marcelo’s article on voter-ID legislation currently under consideration in the Rhode Island House. The first is the degree to which Rhode Island ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown’s inane argument implies ulterior, political motives: “When we have no charges filed, when we have no convictions filed…
While the story of legislators looking for ways to advance a bill that apparently cannot get committee approval on its own merits was playing out at the RI Statehouse last week, in another part of the building, according to accounts that have been provided to me from several sources, a group of Representatives was working…
Last week, the RI House Labor Committee reviewed two bills: In both cases, the views were sharply divided, with labor supporting and cities and towns opposing a bill that would allow municipal employee collective-bargaining contract terms to continue after a contract expires and also allow monetary issues in those contracts to be decided in binding…
Most people probably have an idealized image of the legislative process as one in which legislators draft bills that they desire, other legislators sign on as they’re interested, and everybody votes according to their understanding of the consequences. It seems somehow foreign to everyday life to trade votes on unrelated issues and such, but in…
New plan. Better plan. Instead of trying to post something on all of the bills that have been submitted during a week, the week after they have been submitted (which, to be honest, was an interesting experience but was starting to make my eyeballs bleed from too much staring at the computer), I will post…
The legislation has so little chance of coming anywhere close to enactment that proposing it is mainly theatrics, but it’s definitely a show worth performing, if only to remind people that the process exists to make it happen: [The bill by Rep. Joe Trillo (R, Warwick)] would rewrite the rulebook on negotiations with public-employee unions,…
It doesn’t quite rise to the level of Whitehousian attack, but RI House Representative John Edwards (D, Portsmouth, Tiverton) does give a tax reformer reason to wonder how evenly his representation applies: “There is a loophole in that law that some groups have been employing to avoid reporting campaign activities around a Financial Town Meeting,”…