The Dreaded Drawer

Becky Farrell/AARP Wyoming

Former Wyoming Speaker of The House Steve Harshman presides over the 2020 Wyoming House of Representatives.

This story originally appeared in the May 2020 edition of The AARP Wyoming News

The dreaded drawer. It is the place Wyoming lobbyists and advocates most fear their bills disappearing to, but explaining what that means is a more involved process.

There are 24 people in the Wyoming Legislature who have the ability to pocket veto, or keep a bill from being heard in the Legislature, a process known as “keeping a bill in the drawer”. If a committee is assigned a bill the chair of that committee doesn’t want to hear, the chair can refuse to hear the bill. If the bill gets out of committee, a Majority Floor Leader can elect not to hear the bill in their chamber of the Legislature. The Speaker of the Wyoming House or President of The Wyoming State Senate can also refuse to hear a bill in their chamber.

“I would guess there are more years than not where the Senate President and The Speaker Of The House have simply not put bills out,” says Senate President Drew Perkins. “I would guess over my two years as Senate President I kept maybe 10 bills in the drawer. There is an old saying in the Legislature, ‘good ideas always come back.’ Sometimes it just takes a couple years to pass a bill.

“Of course bad bills come back too sometimes.”

Speaker of The Wyoming House of Representatives Steve Harshman said he tends not to drawer many bills as a general practice. He also points out the Legislative body can recall a bill from a committee chair’s drawer with a simple majority vote.

“You try to get out the important bills early and then try to control the workflow so one committee doesn’t have 10 bills and another committee doesn’t have any,” Harshman says. “That is why sometimes you see a bill go somewhere like the ag committee when it doesn’t have much to do with ag.”

Harshman did leave one bill in the dreaded drawer this year that had the support of AARP Wyoming - Senate File 37 would have allowed psychologists from out-of-state to offer telehealth visits in Wyoming, allowing the state to join The Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact. Harshman says he felt the legislation wasn’t quite ready to move forward with unanswered questions around how money for board dues was concerned and how money was spent.

Hollis Hackman of the Wyoming Psychological Association says there were a few of his members with concerns that joining the Compact would mean the state relinquishes its ability to decide what the qualifications for a psychologist are.

“However, the bill had no impact on our current practice act, which sets forth the qualifications for licensure,” says Hackman. “And in fact, if a psychologist from another Compact State were to practice in our state under the compact, they would have to comply with our practice act. There were some other concerns about fees and where that money was going, but the big concern had to do with licensure requirements. There is a provision in the Compact for our state to restrict a bad actor’s license and then refer the investigation back to the home state of that provider for a full investigation.”

Those concerns led to Harshman deciding the bill would not be heard in The House.

“I am a little cautious of interstate compacts,” says Harshman. “You give up the ability for state control. I talked to people I trust on this issue, and those who worked on it in the committee and the idea was we can keep working on it. It will come back as a committee bill, and I plan on pushing it in the management council to finish that work next year.

“We want more providers in the state,” Harshman continues. “I get that. I am not trying to fence people out. We have a lot of compacts and some are better than others. I just want to make sure we get it right. Another year into this thing, I think we can have it ready.”

While Harshman points out the telepsychology bill received the most attention, it was far from the only bill he didn’t allow to be heard. Also left in the drawer this year were bills around corporate income tax, and wind tax bills.

Perkins shares a similar philosophy with Harshman when it comes to when and why to pocket veto a bill. He says each year it seems there are some larger themes that tend to play out based on a number of bills that have the same subject matter. Part of the weight he gives a bill is whether a bill adds or detracts from those conversations and what financial shape the state is in. That last question may have led to two bills AARP Wyoming was following getting stuck in the drawer.

“You look at where the budget was and then in the last couple days of session, the budget got worse with oil, gas, and coal struggling. There were a couple bills that were giveaways to taxpayers and this isn’t the time for that,” Perkins says.

In 2020, Harshman was also in the rare position of being someone who not only left a bill in the drawer, but also had one of the bills he sponsored die in the drawer of someone else. Harshman sponsored House Bill 110, which would offer a cost of living adjustment (COLA) to those who had previously worked for the State of Wyoming. In addition to House Bill 110, Cheyenne Representative Bill Henderson brought House Bill 112, which would also allow for a COLA and ask for study on other issues related to COLA. Harshman chose to fold his bill into Henderson’s bill, which allowed it to pass the House. However, when it went to the Senate, the bill was never heard, dying in the drawer of Senate President Perkins.

“I’m not sure why he held it, I haven’t asked him,” Harshman says. “I thought I would get a hearing. I thought Representative Henderson’s bill had some study components I really liked, so we went with my distribution and his study.

Perkins points out he actually has close family members who would have benefited from a COLA, but it wasn’t enough for him to consider moving the bill into a committee.

According to Perkins, at one point, around 15 years ago, the state’s large retirement plan was funded at around 115 percent of its obligations. However, between COLAs given to retirees at that time, and a downturn in the stock market in 2009, the health of the retirement plans dropped to over 70 percent funded.

“The rest of the taxpayers in Wyoming have paid over $50 million to support state plans,” Perkins says. “At some point it becomes not fair to the other taxpayers in the state… The most important thing is to keep that money sound, so it is a promise made and a promise kept to retirees.”

House Bill 139 was another bill that didn’t find its way out of the Senate President’s drawer. The proposal would have allowed those age 65 and older with an income of less than $13,000 per year or a married couple with an annual income of less than $21,000 a year to receive a tax rebate of between $700-800 per year.

“With where the state’s funds are right now, and the fact we are writing $300 million checks to the school foundation program (from the general fund) and the fact Legislative Stabilization Reserve Account is dropping, it is only going to get worse and it isn’t the time to have new programs to fund these new giveaways.”

The last bill of AARP interest that met its demise in the drawer this year was House Bill 49, which would have instructed the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services to continue to work on the task of retirement security, by reaching out to existing businesses when new information is available or for retirement savings efforts.