Inside Baseball: Making Your Legislature Work For You

There are those legislative activities that make the news and there are those that don’t. I want to tell you about a bill that you haven’t heard about, haven’t read about and haven’t seen on the news, but I think will make a big difference – HB 5496 An Act Implementing the Recommendations of the Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee Requiring Committees of Cognizance to Conduct Reviews Under the Sunset Law. The bill allows the Program Review and Investigations Committee (“PRI”) to focus on major issues that affect our state.

First, I need to give you a little background. PRI is one of three committees on which I serve.  It is a completely bipartisan committee that is composed of 12 members – 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans from the House and 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans from the Senate. I asked to serve on PRI because I thought it would be an excellent vehicle to make sure our tax dollars are being well spent. As it’s name implies, PRI is empowered to investigate and review any aspect of our state government and make recommendations to the full legislature based on its findings.     

With that understanding, I was excited to be named to PRI. My excitement, though, was short-lived.  Soon after I started working on the committee, I learned that a good deal of PRI’s work was dictated by the state’s sunset law (C.G.S. §§2c-1 – 2c-21). The sunset law required PRI to review approximately 75 different entities or programs over a five-year period. If PRI were to conduct all of these reviews, however, there would be little opportunity for it to undertake any other investigations. An example of one entity we reviewed this past year is the Board of Examiners of Embalmers and Funeral Directors.  

In the case of the Board of Examiners of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, a PRI staff person spent about 50 days researching and drafting the report. The committee also held a public hearing on the report. The end result: we found that the Board of Examiners of Embalmers and Funeral Directors is doing a good job and no changes were required. With the number of other pressing issues facing our state, I, honestly, was ready to pull my hair out.

If I were to ask each of my 23,000 constituents for his or her top 10 list of issues facing the state, I would be shocked if the Board of Examiners of Embalmers and Funeral Directors made it on to anyone’s list. I even spoke with a funeral director who agreed. There may have been issues in that industry years ago, but those issues have been addressed. It seemed to me like an enormous waste of our talented staff’s time to be reviewing this type of program rather than issues of greater importance.

Working with other PRI members, we came up with HB 5496, which passed in the House by a vote of 145-3 and in the Senate by unanimous consent.  The bill takes the 75 programs that PRI is charged with reviewing and assigns them to the legislative committee most closely associated with their purpose. For example, the Board of Examiners of Embalmers and Funeral Directors will now be overseen by the Public Health Committee and will be reviewed by that committee only once every ten years. Based on its findings, the committee can recommend that the program continue if everything is working well, can vote to end a program that no longer serves a useful purpose, or can propose changes to a program. If the committee is presented with an issue that requires further scrutiny, it can refer the matter back to PRI to undertake the investigation. 

What this new procedure does is free up PRI to fulfill what should be its real purpose - to review and investigate major issues facing the state. Here are a couple of things PRI will be taking up immediately. 

First, PRI will look into how the state can maximize the federal dollars it receives.  In working with PRI’s staff to determine the scope of this project, I learned that there are approximately 2200 federal programs through which the state may be eligible for money and that Connecticut currently participates in only about 550 of those programs. The sense I get is that there may be a great opportunity to bring millions and millions of our federal tax dollars back to Connecticut. 

A second area PRI plans to investigate is Medicaid. Each election cycle, we hear allegations of “Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse.”  We want to look into that.  If it is there, let’s find it and end it. 

Those are just a couple of examples of major issues that PRI now has the freedom to investigate with the passage of HB 5496.  I thought you should know about this important change.

State Rep. Brian Becker represents Avon, Farmington and West Hartford in the 19th District. For more information, visit his website at www.housedems.ct.gov/Becker.