Horse trading session has arrived at N.H. State House
Both the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate worked late into the night Thursday as they tried desperately to revive bills that the other branch didn't want.
The political game of chicken is expected to continue this week when the two bodies return to session to create committees of conference that will be charged with trying to work out differences between competing versions of a bill.
This stage in the budget process signals that the 2025 session, barring a negotiating meltdown, will conclude in the coming weeks.
Once named, the conference committees will have until June 19 to come up with an agreement that the Legislature must act upon by June 26.
Both bodies must vote to create these panels with three state senators and four House members.
Any agreement requires all conferees to sign onto the proposal; it then returns to the House and Senate for an up-or-down vote, meaning lawmakers at that final meeting are unable to amend it in any fashion.
The two-year state budget is the biggest and most consequential of the disputes, with the Senate last week approving its measure that spent nearly $250 million more than the House-approved version.
All of this one-upmanship resulted in some strange bedfellows, like when the Senate voted to add to a bill increasing the penalty for wrong-way driving (HB 776) and a Senate-passed bill to declare the Virginia opossum the state marsupial (SB 30).
Sen. Donovan Fenton, D-Keene, thanked his colleagues for this act taken because the House put his own bill at risk when, earlier this month, it had tacked onto it new penalties for improper application of fertilizer.
Senate Democratic Leader Rebecca Perkins Kwoka of Portsmouth couldn't resist a punning quip.
'I'm glad the senator from Dist. 10 (Fenton) has not played dead on his bill,' she joked.
The House responded last week, adding to a bill raising the personal allowance that residents of nursing homes are allowed to keep (SB 118) the House-passed bill that would allow medically eligible patients to grow their own marijuana rather than have to buy it at alternative treatment centers at market costs.
House keeps pushing cannabis agenda
Rep. Gary Daniels, R-Milford, tried to convince his colleagues to drop this last-ditch effort.
'The Senate has rejected every single cannabis bill the House has sent it. Do we really want to put a good bill at risk by insisting this be included?' Daniels asked rhetorically.
Rep. Wendy Thomas, D-Merrimack, a cancer survivor, said as an eligible patient she takes marijuana every day and that the underlying personal allowance issue is already contained in versions of the state budget.
The House voted 215-103 to keep the marijuana bill as part of the House position.
Not all of these gambits succeeded.
Rep. Judy Aron, R-Acworth and chairman of the House Environment and Agriculture Committee, had wanted to add to legislation that designated Coos County as an economically distressed area to (SB 180), an unrelated bill from her committee to enhance state rules regarding the approval of future landfills that the Senate had rejected (HB 707).
The House voted 166-163 against that idea, choosing to keep the Coos County economic bill clean.
In one of its last moves, the Senate voted to add onto a temporary youth operator driver's license bill (HB 612) its legislation to declare the third week in September each year "New Hampshire Service Dog Week."
Moments earlier, the House had voted, 179-144, to kill that service dog bill (SB 198).
"We don't need a special holiday in order to say, 'Good dog,'" said Rep. Erica Layon, R-Derry.
Here are some other issues that are likely to need more negotiation before they are settled:
• Mandatory Minimums (SB 14): This Gov. Kelly Ayotte-priority bill that cleared the Senate set stiff mandatory prison terms for offenders selling large amounts of fentanyl and for anyone convicted of selling drugs that causes someone else's death.
The House changed it to give a judge broad latitude to approve a lesser punishment if the offender meets certain criteria. The House also added to this bill a measure the Senate rejected to decriminalize possession of up to three-quarters of an ounce of psilocybin, otherwise known as magic mushrooms.
This change would bring the mushrooms in line with how state law decriminalizes marijuana possession.
https://gc.nh.gov/bill_status/legacy/bs2016/billText.aspx?sy=2025&id=235&txtFormat=html
• Risk Pools (SB 297): Secretary of State David Scanlan convinced the Senate to adopt a bill that gave his office greater power over groups that manage insurance coverage for units of government. The House instead rejected Scanlan's approach in favor of letting these risk pools decide if they would rather come under the regulation of the Insurance Department.
• Tenancy Law Changes (HB 60): The House approved this bill that would permit landlords to give notice to any tenant 60 days notice that they would not be extending their lease and require tenants be evicted if they resisted this move. The Senate adopted this proposal but it would only kick in once the state had a 4% vacancy rate; currently this tight housing market has less than one-half of 1% vacancy in it.
klandrigan@unionleader.com
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