By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

State Rep. Christine Watkins called the KOAL newsroom to provide her weekly legislative update. In this conversation, Watkins discussed legislation she has worked through the house, bills that have caught her attention, and peeled back the curtain on what it’s like to work in a part-time legislature.

Opening our discussion, the Representative spoke on HB352 or the Geological Carbon Storage Amendments. “I had the director of the Board of Oil and Gas and Mining for the state come to me and ask me to run this bill. And what we want to do is have primacy over the class six injection wells so that the EPA does not have the primacy, the state of Utah does.”

Rep. Watkins continued, ” I was able to get the bill done. Thank goodness I had a bill that was able to do that because sometimes when people come to you at the beginning of the session, you just have to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it. There’s not enough time. We’ll do it next year to find someone who has a priority bill.’ And luckily I had one left.”

She expanded upon this explanation, discussing how the part-time nature of the legislature – which is only in session for 45 days – can impact the ability of legislators to draft and pass bills. “I always, I’ve had some people reach out to me with some things and I’ve had to say, ‘listen, we file bills from May on, but the longer you wait, the harder it is for us to be able to get it written.’ Because we don’t write them. We have attorneys that are hired, we call them drafting attorneys, and that’s what they do. They check all the laws and write it in legalese. And there are 104 legislators. There are not 104 drafting attorneys. So we keep them very busy. So they can be working on it during the summer. And a lot of my bills were ready to go the day we started the session.”

Moving back to bills, Watkins spoke on HB384 or the Child Support Requirements,” a lot of people don’t have to pay child support because they’re below the income level, but other people do. And they’re trying hard to do the things that DCFS is requiring of them to either keep or get their children back. And so when you require them to pay a pretty hefty child support bill every month, and they’ll garnish people’s wages, it is just more than they can handle. And so I have the support of DCFS, the federal government, and many other states saying, we don’t need to do this anymore. Unfortunately, it means putting a couple of million bucks back so that the state would pay it. This is not a good year to do that. We don’t have a lot of money. So I may receive support for the bill, but I don’t know that there’s going to be money. So I’ve got to do a little bit of checking to see where we could get the money to do this.”

Another bill Watkins had hit with a fiscal note was HB79 or the Adaptive Driving Equipment Amendments which,” creates sales and use tax exemptions for sales of adaptive driving equipment installed in a motor vehicle.” Despite the fiscal note, Rep. Watkins described the support the legislature showed for the bill,” it passed through the House Tax and Revenue Committee unanimously. And so it’s up on what we call the Third House Reading Board. It’s a ways down. So it’ll be a day or two before I’ll be presenting it on the floor. But they loved it. And we kind of had to take a broad bill and bring it down. But I didn’t know that there are car dealers up here who fill that niche. They put all sorts of adaptive driving equipment in cars and trucks and vans for people who need it. And so these are the kind of places where if you buy a vehicle from them, they would not charge you the tax on the adaptive driving equipment. You have to pay the tax on the vehicle, but not on that equipment.”

One bill that has caught the attention of the media and legislators alike is HB400, which has been described as a “BYOB- Bring your own Blood” to surgery bill. 

“And there’s a story behind it,” explained Watkins,” The representative who is sponsoring this bill had a very good friend who was having surgery and wanted blood and wanted to have certain people donate that blood. Well, the state of Utah says we’ll take blood, but we can’t, we’re not going to guarantee you’re going to get it back. And so they had to go to Florida to do this, to have the surgery and have the blood available from the people that they wanted. And so it seems like a common sense request.”

A non-policy item Rep. Watkins spoke on the checks and balances she sees between the House of Representatives, the state Senate and the Governor. “You know, we can send a bill over to them and they can pass it just like it is. And then it’s on its way to the governor or they can just let it sit there in their rules committee.” She continued,” And I’ve had that happen with some of my bills or they can make a major change. And if they do that – if they even change two words – that bill has to come back to the house and we have to concur. We have to agree with them that we like the changes they made. So a lot of times when I am talking about bills, it’s going to sail through the house but it could die in the Senate.”

In closing, the Representative shared,” Just hang on. If you have a bill they want to watch, just go to le.utah.gov and they’ll find a tab where they can look at bills. They can look at what we’re doing.”

*Photo Courtesy of the Utah House of Representatives