The 2024 legislative session began last week and ARRM staff have wasted no time making sure that ARRM’s priorities get officially introduced.
This session is a "short session" and with the state budget set for the biennium, much of the focus will be on capital infrastructure/bonding projects and passing policy-only legislation. ARRM is entering this legislative session with a robust agenda, you can go to the public policy page on the ARRM website to review our full list of priorities and download our two separate one-page documents that outline the nine different bills we will be bringing forward.
This week, all nine Senate bills and three of our nine House bills were officially introduced and received bill numbers, the remaining bills are expected for formal introduction on Monday. You can track all of ARRM’s legislation, as well as other pieces of legislation that ARRM is following with the bill tracking tool on ARRM’s website, found here.
Committee hearings last week focused on updates from the various Departments and discussion of larger priority bills that were carried over from the last legislative session. As we look ahead to this coming week, we will start to see more bills being scheduled for formal hearings, including ARRM's technology proposal (SF 3736), which is scheduled to be heard in the Senate Human Service Committee on Wednesday, February 21.
Take Action
Finally, while there is not an official call to action on the state level this week, I do want to draw your attention to a recent piece of legislation that was introduced on the federal level. The Disability Community Act (H.R. 7267) was introduced last week and would provide a Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) increase for states over three years to help providers who rely on Medicaid funding comply with regulatory obligations, including those changes in overtime pay requirements as proposed by the Department of Labor's (DOL) Overtime Rule. Our national trade association ANCOR put out an action alert in support of the legislation, please take a moment and respond to that alert here.
Please reach out with any questions.
--Sara Grafstrom, Senior Director of State and Federal Policy