Lottery is seen as session's wild card

Wheels greased for other issues

In the special session convening Monday, Arkansas' lawmakers will consider legislation to increase funding for prison beds and for school employees' health insurance. Another bill would prohibit the state lottery from deploying electronic monitor games.

This is the second special session called by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe during the past eight months to enact measures aimed at reducing large increases in premiums for members of the state's public school employees health insurance plan.

During October's special session, the Legislature authorized the use of $43 million in state surplus funds to help cut proposed premium increases of about 50 percent for members of the public school employees health insurance plan to about 10 percent this year and enacted measures to shift $36 million per year in state funds to the plan in the fiscal year starting Tuesday.

The latest legislation seeks to stave off a rate increase as high as 35 percent for roughly 47,000 teachers and other public school employees. The state's Employee Benefits Division projects about an overall rate increase of 3 percent next year if these changes and other recommendations by a legislative task force are adopted.

This week's special session is to convene Monday at 4 p.m. and may wrap up action on Wednesday shortly after midnight, said Senate President Pro Tempore Michael Lamoureux, R-Russellville. Friday is the July Fourth holiday.

During the October special session, lawmakers decided to work into the wee hours on the final day of a three-day session because Lamoureux said at the time that lawmakers "are ready to go home."

The House will be convening in the old Capitol in downtown Little Rock, now the Old State House Museum, because its chambers in the state Capitol are undergoing a restoration project, while the Senate will be convening in its chambers at the Capitol.

While the bills aiding the public school employees health insurance plan and cutting the backlog of state inmates in county jails are widely expected to sail through the Legislature, the fate of the bill barring the state lottery from offering electronic monitor games is far from clear.

Beebe said Friday that there's "a good chance" the lottery-related legislation might be defeated in the House Rules Committee, which was appointed by House Speaker Davy Carter, R-Cabot.

Carter said Friday that he would meet with the House Rules Committee's members to gauge their opinions and their intensity about the legislation, which he opposes. Last year, a bill requiring at least 25 percent of the lottery's proceeds go to scholarships failed to clear the House committee after its foes argued that it would force the lottery to cut prizes for lottery players and ultimately lead to reduced ticket sales and net proceeds for college scholarships.

On Friday, Beebe added the legislation sponsored by Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, to the agenda for the special session, after the governor said there were at least 60 votes in the 100-member House for the bill. He said he's still confident that the special session will only last three days.

Lamoureux said he doesn't think the lottery-related legislation will "stretch out the session," although "there are intensive feelings on both sides."

"We'll pass it or not and then go home," he said. "It has support on our side of the building and it is up to them [in the House] to do what they think is appropriate."

In April, the Arkansas Lottery Commission authorized the implementation of electronic monitor games to help boost declining ticket revenue and net proceeds for college scholarships, one day after a majority of the Legislature's Lottery Oversight Committee voted to declare its opposition to the games.

Supporters of the quick-draw game that the lottery wants to offer starting in September said it's similar to Powerball and Mega Millions, except drawings would be held every four minutes and results would be shown on monitors similar to television screens set up in participating locations.

Opponents of the electronic monitor games include Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, whose lobbyists have been working with lawmakers who want to ban the electronic monitor games.

Hickey and other legislative opponents of the electronic monitor games maintain that Arkansas voters didn't envision the lottery offering electronic monitor games in 2008 when they approved a constitutional amendment to allow the Legislature to create a state lottery for college scholarships.

But lottery officials counter that about 15 state lotteries, including Missouri, already offer electronic monitor games, such as keno and quick-draw, and the Legislature explicitly authorized these games in the state's lottery law enacted in 2009.

Two of the bills on the agenda for this week's special session are aimed at reducing rate increases for full-time public school employees.

Among other things, the measures would drop about 4,000 part-time school employees from the plan, exclude from coverage employees' spouses who have access to insurance from their own employers, and limit a legislatively mandated program covering weight loss surgeries.

The state's Employee Benefits Division is conservatively estimating about $9 million a year in savings from these bills -- if they're enacted -- and most of the savings would come from dropping part-time school employees and limiting weight loss surgeries, said state Rep. Harold Copenhaver, D-Jonesboro.

Copenhaver, vice chairman of the State Public School Life and Health Insurance Program Legislative Task Force, said its recommendation to drop coverage for part-time school employees is "probably the most understood portion" of the two measures.

Proponents of the proposal say most of the employees would qualify for subsidized coverage that became available Jan. 1 under the federal health care overhaul law.

"If the part-time employees are truly part-time employees they can go to the private option [program under which the state taps federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private health insurance for low-income Arkansans] and we will educate them on their choices," Copenhaver said.

The expansion of the Medicaid program, approved by the Legislature last year, extends coverage to adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level -- $16,105 for an individual or $32,913 for a family of four. During the past two years, the Legislature has barely obtained the three-fourths majority required in the House and Senate to authorize the use of federal funds for the program. The election of two private option opponents in the Senate apparently leaves the chamber two votes shy of the 27 required to reauthorize funding in the 2015 session.

More than 150,000 people have obtained health-insurance coverage through the program since enrollment began Oct. 1, according to the state Department of Human Services.

The federal government will pay the full cost until 2017, when states will begin paying 5 percent of the cost. The states' share will then rise each year until it reaches 10 percent in 2020.

Copenhaver said he expects school districts to work with part-time employees who don't qualify for the private option program, to possibly give them more duties and additional hours to reach 30 hours, so they become full-time employees.

School districts would save about $7 million annually because they would no longer have to contribute toward the cost of roughly 4,000 part-time employees' insurance. The districts are now required to contribute at least $150 per month for each employee enrolled.

But state Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, said she opposes the legislation that drops coverage for part-time school employees.

"Your school bus drivers and cafeteria workers are a critical part of that and, if the private option is not around next year, where do they go?"

Asked about that, Copenhaver replied, "We can't change the bill to include a fail-safe option because if we bring back the part-time employees, we are going to be right back to the same problem we had before. They utilized the program more than the other employees. .... In the private sector, part-time employees are not offered insurance coverage."

Supporters of the legislation said it eventually would transfer about $4.6 million a year from school districts to the public school employees health insurance plan from school districts' payroll tax savings. These savings would not be available to offset health insurance premiums until 2016, and the savings are unknown at this time, according to the Employee Benefits Division.

Lawmakers will also be asked to increase funding for the criminal justice system.

Beebe is proposing to reallocate $6.3 million a year from the state's Central Services fund to open about 600 prison and county jail beds to help relieve the backlog of nearly 2,400 state inmates in county jails. The state Department of Correction has 14,528 inmates in its prisons, and another 2,397 are being held in county jails because the prisons are full, according to department spokesman Shea Wilson.

"It is something we really should have done in the fiscal session [earlier this year], but didn't," said Sen. Larry Teague, D-Nashville, co-chairman of the Legislature's Joint Budget Committee.

"Clearly, we got issues. [Opening] 600 beds is a start," said Teague.

A section on 06/29/2014

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