Latest news with #SenateBill79
San Francisco Chronicle
04-06-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
California bill allowing more housing near transit stops narrowly passes Senate
State Sen. Scott Wiener's bill to legalize mid-rise apartments around major transit stops squeezed through the state Senate Tuesday, five years after his previous attempt died in the same chamber. Senate Bill 79 would allow taller, denser projects — whether housing or commercial — to be built within a half-mile of some transit stops, with the most generous bonuses reserved for projects near major systems like BART, Caltrain and parts of the Los Angeles Metro. The maximum height and density would depend on how close a project is to a transit stop, and the type of transit it's near. Most projects would likely be buildings between four and six stories, said Michael Lane, state policy director with urban policy think tank SPUR, which backed the bill. The bill would also allow projects built on land owned by transit agencies to bypass the California Environmental Quality Act, a law that critics say often leads to yearslong development delays, if they include an improvement to the transit infrastructure. In a nail-biting session in which the bill at first didn't have enough support — that is, until some members showed up at the last minute to pass it — SB 79 received the exact number of votes it needed to pass the state Senate. It still needs to get through the Assembly to become law. But its passage in the first chamber reflects a potential shift in legislators' willingness to push through housing bills over the opposition of cities — and even some of its Democratic members. The shift illustrates how housing affordability has become an increasingly vital political issue — particularly in the Bay Area, where all but one of the senators representing the region supported the bill. California renters continue to be burdened at some of the highest rates in the nation, with the cost of building housing far above that of other states. Wiener's last attempt at a transit-oriented housing bill, which was more expansive and would have also allowed for denser housing near job centers, died in the Senate by three votes in 2020. The lawmaker said that this time, the legislation is 'nuanced and surgical,' focusing largely on major transit systems. Smaller transit systems, such as those without dedicated bus lanes or signal priority, wouldn't be covered by the bill. 'California urgently needs to build more homes to bring down costs, and building them near transit provides our public transportation systems with an urgently needed infusion of new riders,' Wiener said. 'This is an idea whose time has come.' A portion of the homes built through SB 79, would have to be set aside for lower-income households, as determined by either local law or state density requirements. Supporters of the bill, which include a number of California YIMBY groups, said SB 79 would simultaneously address housing, transit and the environment. It would allow for housing within walking distance of trains, light rails and buses, they argued, reducing residents' reliance on cars and giving a boost to the state's struggling transit systems. 'These are not skyscrapers that we are asking for,' Lane of SPUR said. 'It's just that kind of density that can help our transit systems work throughout the Bay, or even outside of the larger cities where we do have that robust transit.' But dozens of California cities, including Napa, Palo Alto, San Rafael and Walnut Creek, staunchly oppose the bill, saying it would effectively contradict their own housing plans by letting developers build at a scale they never intended for their neighborhoods. 'There is already accumulating data that purport to show that overriding local control like this, given that most local housing elements include state housing mandates, has not resulted in needed housing,' Alice Fredericks, legislative committee chair of the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, said in a statement. 'SB 79 further eviscerates local control without even pretending to be in service of filling the need for housing.' Wiener said he took such concerns into account. SB 79 would allow cities and counties to create an 'alternative plan' that trims the density around one transit stop in exchange for boosting density along another, as long as this doesn't lower the number of feasible units. And whatever homes were built would generally still have to follow other local development rules and go through environmental review, unless the developer used a separate streamlining law such as SB 423. Still, some of the bill's strongest critics were Wiener's fellow Democrats. Some said on Tuesday that California's transit systems, many of which are still struggling to regain ridership post-COVID, are not yet robust enough to justify building housing nearby. Others expressed concern that the bill doesn't do enough to prevent displacement or build subsidized housing. If members of the state Assembly take those concerns seriously, they could lead SB 79 to the same fate as Wiener's last transit-oriented housing bill.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Back to Basics
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter takes a look at a few major housing developments in state legislatures. Stories include: How a California transit-oriented development bill survived a crucial committee hearing, while a missing middle bill wasn't so lucky Montana lawmakers continue to perform more miracles on zoning reform. Washington legislators pass statewide rent control. As the newsletter covered last week, two significant California housing bills, Senate Bill 79 and Senate Bill 677—which would respectively upzone land near transit and liberalize regulations on duplexes and starter homes—faced a make-or-break hearing before the Senate Housing Committee. One made it, the other broke. The committee rejected S.B. 677 and approved S.B. 79. The latter bill now heads to the state Senate's Local Government Committee. The immediate practical implication is that any serious reforms to the state's signature missing middle housing regulations are a dead letter this year, while debates about whether or not to enable more transit-oriented development will continue. The housing committee hearing itself included some tense, if exceedingly inside-baseball, drama. S.B. 79 passed over the objection of Senate Housing Committee Chair Aisha Wahab (D–Hayward), who has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the ability of market-rate (i.e. unsubsidized) housing to ease California's housing shortage. "Rolling the chair," as that is colloquially called, is considered an unusual and confrontational move. When testifying in favor of S.B. 79, Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), the author of that bill and S.B. 677, also spent a considerable amount of time criticizing the unusually negative committee report on S.B. 79. This was a not-so-veiled swipe at Wahab, whose committee consultants prepared a report that included no recommendations for how to amend or improve S.B. 79, and instead just urged a simple "no" vote. Wiener compared the report to a line from Marge Simpson's aunt (he meant mother), who says in one episode, "It hurts to talk, so I'll just say one thing: you never do anything right." Wahab, during her own remarks at the housing committee hearing, spared no criticism of S.B. 79, which she said was unacceptable so long as it didn't include affordable housing mandates. "Bypassing affordable units perpetuates socioeconomic segregation, which is de facto racial segregation," she said at the hearing. While California's supply-side housing reformers can be happy that S.B. 79 did survive a hostile committee hearing, the nature of the debate is nevertheless a depressing reminder of just how little progress has been made conceptually on this issue. In the state with one of the worst housing crises in the country, lawmakers are still having this very rudimentary discussion about whether enabling more housing production generally will lower housing costs. This should be a no-brainer. Economic theory and real-world results from other, less regulated states make it abundantly clear that when more new housing is built, even when it's expensive "luxury" housing, average prices fall. The people who can't afford the newest, most expensive housing still benefit from falling rents on older, existing units. The alternative idea that new housing has to be built as money-losing, below-market-rate housing in order for it to improve affordability is not just false, but gallingly so. It's easy to see the absurdity of that position when it applies to any other good. Imagine a lawmaker arguing in the middle of a famine that new land can't be opened up for farming unless farmers are required to sell their crops at a loss. That California legislators, let alone the chair of the state Senate's Housing Committee, still don't grok that very obviously true idea is equal parts alarming and sad. On one of the most important issues facing California, legislators are still fighting over the basics. The good news is that lawmakers in other states have in fact grokked the basics on housing. In Montana, lawmakers have built on last session's housing reforms (the so-called "Montana Miracle") with the passage of a slew of bills that pare back local parking minimums and height limits, while capping impact fees charged on new housing developments. The parking reform bill, House Bill 492 authored by Rep. Katie Zolnikov (R–Billings), prevents city zoning codes from requiring parking for child care facilities, assisted living facilities, affordable housing, and residential units under 1,200 square feet. A second bill, S.B. 243 authored by Sen. Ellie Boldman (D–Missoula), would prevent local governments from setting height limits of fewer than sixty feet in downtown areas, industrial areas, and commercial clusters. Those two bills pair well with a law enacted in 2023 that allows mixed-use and multifamily residential buildings in commercial zones. While that bill ended explicit zoning bans on building apartments in downtown commercial areas, minimum parking requirements and height limits still made residential development practically infeasible. With S.B. 243, a developer would have every right to convert a centrally located commercial lot into a six-story apartment building. Provided the units are all under 1,200 square feet, H.B. 492 would free them from any obligation to add parking—which is often a development killer on smaller lots. "It's going to be a big deal. There are a lot of cities in Montana that maintain some pretty severe height limits. We should be building up," says Kendall Cotton, the president of the Frontier Institute, a Montana-based think tank. Another notable bill, S.B. 133, eliminates local governments' ability to charge impact fees for landscaping and caps increases on impact fees to the producer price index's increase in commodity prices. Montana's zoning reforms are notable both for their sweep and their simplicity. Contra the typical California zoning reform, Montana's bills are all a few pages long, and refreshingly free from endless carve-outs and caveats about labor standards and affordability mandates. That leaves less room for local governments to exploit loopholes and makes the bills more intelligible and usable for developers. State-level zoning preemptions are a pretty recent phenomenon in the Montana Legislature. When Danny Tenenbaum, a former Democratic legislator from Missoula, introduced a fourplex bill in the 2021 session, it didn't make it out of committee. But that defeat was followed by Gov. Greg Gianforte assembling a bipartisan task force in 2022 to look at ways to increase housing supply in the state. A number of recommendations from that task force, including preemption of local restrictions on duplexes and accessory dwelling units, managed to pass with the governor's backing in 2023. Now that lawmakers are more used to the idea of state-level preemption, it's easier to build support for subsequent bills, says Tenenbaum. "Once we passed a few bills and got people used to voting yes to putting some sideboards on what regulations local governments can impose, that made it a lot easier to bring other bills that set further limits on what red tape cities can use to slow down and block housing development," he tells Reason. Having passed the Legislature, Montana's housing reforms go to the governor for a signature. Once transmitted to his desk, Gianforte will have 10 days to sign them. Tenenbaum wrote a comprehensive rundown of all the bills that have passed the Montana Legislature this session for the Sightline Institute. Read Reason's interview with Gianforte about housing reform here. The slow, steady rehabilitation of rent control continued this past week, with the Washington Legislature giving final approval to a bill that caps annual rent increases to the lesser of 7 percent plus inflation or 10 percent. As Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, the bill faced opposition from both the legislature's Republican minority and some moderate Democrats who expressed credible fears that capping rents would reduce home construction. Those moderates briefly succeeded in raising the rent increase cap to 10 percent plus inflation. But this was then cut back down to 7 percent. The bill passed on the last day of the state's legislative session. Washington follows the example of its southern neighbor, Oregon, which in 2019 passed the country's first state-level rent control law. California followed suit later that year. Washington's bill includes a number of moderating provisions, including an exemption for buildings that were built in the last 12 years and two-, three-, and four-unit buildings when the owner lives on site. The bill also allows vacancy decontrol, meaning landlords can raise rents an unlimited amount on vacant units. This makes Washington's bill relatively more modest than some legacy local rent control policies as exist in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, where rent increases are typically capped at one or two percent a year. That's not to say that it's costless. Economic theory and academic research are clear that to the degree that rent control suppresses rents, it will also suppress housing construction and/or housing quality. Today's moderate rent control policy can also become tomorrow's strict rent control policy. In 2019, New York drastically tightened longstanding rent stabilization policies covering New York City. The policy has certainly helped to suppress rents. New data from the New York Apartment Association, an advocacy group for property owners, show continually falling rental incomes, falling maintenance spending, and a sharp increase in financially distressed properties following the 2019 reforms. California is currently considering a bill to slash its own state-wide rent cap from 5 percent plus inflation to 2 percent plus inflation, and expand controls to many single-family homes and condominiums. Like dozens of states around the country, Washington had sworn off rent control. There were no state-level controls, and state law prohibited localities from adopting their own policy—always a sore spot for Seattle socialists. Washington's rent control bill leaves the prohibition on local rent control laws in place. Provided Gov. Bob Ferguson signs it, it'll join the movement to rehabilitate a once radioactive policy. Over at Commentary, Seth Mandel covers a contentious zoning fight in Linden, New Jersey, where the town's Orthodox Jewish community is objecting to new rules limiting the size of homes on smaller lots. The town's Jewish residents argue that limiting the size of homes is a ban on the kinds of large family-sized homes that Orthodox Jews with large families require. Mandel's article details additional zoning restrictions seemingly aimed at the Jewish community, including Linden continually expanding minimum lot sizes for houses of worship until none could be built in the town. That latter restriction would seem to be an easy target for a lawsuit under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a federal law that protects religious land uses from local and state land use regulations. Other Orthodox communities in New Jersey, with the aid of the U.S. Justice Department, have filed successful RLUIPA lawsuits against their towns' zoning restrictions. What stands out in the Linden case is that the zoning restrictions being deployed to allegedly exclude the Jewish community are hardly unique. Towns and cities across the country maintain egregious minimum lot size requirements, excessive regulations on small lot development, and more. Historically, zoning laws were used to exclude certain types of people. Today, their aim is a more general exclusion of people and businesses. That's a little less noxious than outright racial or religious discrimination. It's hardly inclusive. Read Reason's voluminous past coverage of zoning laws tripping up religious land uses. The U.S. Supreme Court mulls taking up a challenge to Los Angeles' COVID-era eviction restrictions. Over at City Journal, the Cicero Institute's Devon Kurtz argues that the Trump administration was right to shutter the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. New York's mayoral candidates are warming to freezing rents at rent-stabilized buildings, reports Politico. Bay Area homeowners sue the city of Belvedere, saying the city has fined them $250,000 over permitting violations they claim were in fact the city bureaucracy's fault, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Ned Resnikoff in The Nation on how YIMBYs are the real class warriors The post Back to Basics appeared first on
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Pour Decisions Made Here' - Bill allowing patrons to pour own alcohol gaining support in NH
The sign just inside the door of Vine 32 Wine and Graze Bar in Bedford says, 'Pour Decisions Made Here.' Self-pour technology may soon become more prevalent in bars, restaurants and craft breweries across New Hampshire if a bill making its way through the state Legislature becomes law. Senate Bill 79 would codify language governing self-serve tap technology where patrons can pour their own alcoholic drinks. Self-pour beer and wine systems are legal and available in 46 U.S. states, including New Hampshire. Connecticut recently became the 46th state to pass a self-pour alcohol bill. In New England, Vermont is the only state yet to put one on the books. While self-pour tech isn't illegal here, as far as anyone knows Vine 32 is the only establishment in the Granite State currently offering such a system — with 32 wines on tap — to the delight of their many customers. 'People really love it,' said Leah Bellemore, who owns and operates Vine 32 with her husband Tom. 'I think, at first, there's still an education component, but as soon as you get in and you understand how the machines work, everyone's like, 'Oh my god, this is brilliant. Where have you been? You need to open one of these everywhere.' 'The ability to have someone be able to go through different pour sizes and really find and figure out what they're into has been really beneficial for a lot of people.' Self-pour automated systems are already allowed in New Hampshire under industry rules, but SB79 would codify the rules into law. House Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs Chairman John Hunt, R- Rindge, said he was there when Vine 32 first opened. 'The question came up whether it was legal, because in terms of the servicing,' Hunt said. 'So at the time, we made an agreement that there would be an employee" who watched the pourers, "so that if somebody stumbles, or somebody looks intoxicated, they can cut the person off. So that was the rule. 'So in terms of putting it in the statute, it's fine, but like I said, I was very happy that I was able to solve the problem for this establishment without legislation.' The bill's prime sponsor, Republican state Sen. Tim Lang of Sanbornton said the appeal of such technology became apparent while 'waiting on my chicken fingers to show up' during a trip to Wisconsin. 'It's not often I can I go to another state and am like, 'Oh, I like what they're doing — I'm gonna bring that to New Hampshire,'' Lang said during a public hearing on the bill before the House Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs. 'But that's the case with this bill. It made it easier that I could just get up and get myself another beer without waiting for the waitress to come over and ask if the table wanted anything.' Lang said he was attending a conference in Wisconsin when he visited a bar. A waitress there checked his ID, swiped his credit card and gave him an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) wristband, which uses radio waves to automatically identify people and things through a chip embedded within it. 'Then they allow you to self-pour your own drinks,' Lang said. 'So you have a wall of taps, and you go up, and you just tap your wristband to it. You pull it and pour — you only get charged for the amount you take. So if I decide I want to try the stout instead of the IPA I usually get, I can take a one ounce pour, and decide if I like it or not. If I don't like it, I can go pour something else. 'It allows consumers to self-serve and only get charged for the amount of beer or drinks that they consume.' The RFID-enabled wristbands used to activate the system also tracks the ounces an individual purchases. 'The issue always comes up is, how do you deal with intoxication?' Lang said. 'I will tell you, I got my wristband shut off while I was at the venue, but it wasn't because I was drinking too much. It was because I was buying too much, because I was buying for the table.' Lang said he went to purchase more drinks, and the system wouldn't let him pour. He went to see a bartender, thinking his wristband might be broken. 'They were like, no, you drank too much,' Lang said. 'And I'm like, No, not true. I've just been buying for the table. So they sent a server over to my table to make sure nobody else was intoxicated before they turned my wristband back on, and once they confirmed there wasn't an over-serving that occurred, they turned my wristband back on, and I was back to buying drinks for everybody.' Vine 32 uses a 'wine card' with a chip in it instead of a wristband, but operationally the system is the same. Put in the card, wait for the blinking light, then push a button for one of three pour sizes — the 'taste,' four ounces or six ounces. 'It allows us to offer different wines at different price points,' Leah Bellemore said. 'We're removing that pretentiousness that a lot of wine can have.' PourMyBev, the parent company of industry-leading self-pour technology provider PourMyBeer, reported in 2024 that 133.9 million ounces were poured using self-pour technology, with beer accounting for 113.86 million ounces. The same year, 3.1 million customers were served, with $71.4 million in revenue generated for operators, the company reported. Lang said SB79 is supported by the hospitality industry and the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire. The bill came out of committee in the state Senate with an "Ought to Pass" recommendation, and is currently in committee in the House. Leah Bellemore said Vine 32 customers love the self-pour option. 'That first initial reaction where people are like 'self-pour, that's weird,' but as soon as they use it they're like, 'Oh my God, this is brilliant,'' Bellemore said. 'I don't see any reason why this isn't the future.'
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
California Housing Bills Face Crucial Hearing Today
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter takes a look at two important pieces of California legislation and the crucial committee hearings that they face today. Over the past half-decade or so, the California Legislature has passed dozens of bills that peel back state and local restrictions on home construction. Despite this flurry of new legislation, actual home construction in the Golden State has continued to stagnate. As a report from YIMBY Law detailed back in February, developers have been slow to make use of laws that are designed to make their jobs easier. The conclusion of that report, and a consensus among the state's housing supply advocates, is that reforms have been hopelessly compromised by legislative mandates and politically convenient carve-outs to powerful interest groups. Builders are allowed to bypass local zoning rules to build homes on commercial corridors and church land, provided they include affordable housing, pay union wages, build to exacting environmental standards, and more. Local governments, often none too keen on new housing, have proven remarkably creative at designing roadblocks to stop housing projects that benefit from state-level streamlining. "Everybody wants a piece," said YIMBY Law's Sonja Trauss to CalMatters back in February. "The pieces taken out during the process wind up derailing the initial concept." This year, the Legislature is considering a number of bills to limit some of these mandates and overcome local obstructionism. Among the 13 housing bills scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Housing Committee today are Senate Bill 677 and Senate Bill 79. The former would add many additional protections to lot splits and duplex projects that were legalized on paper in 2021 via that year's Senate Bill 9. The latter would allow more apartments near transit stops. Proponents of the bills say they'll go a long way toward getting the state's YIMBY revolution working. But late-breaking opposition from many of the same groups that demanded compromising carve-outs in the first place, and a supply-skeptical Housing Committee chair, could derail these efforts. Fixing Missing Middle Perhaps the most underperforming California YIMBY bill is S.B. 9. Passed in 2021 and implemented in 2022, the bill [link pls] allowed property owners to construct duplexes on single-family-zoned lots and divide single-family lots into two properties. Analyses of early versions of the law suggested that it could result in hundreds of thousands of new units in the state's most expensive neighborhoods. Instead, as white papers and media investigations have detailed, the law's unit yield numbers are in the hundreds. Advocates say the legislation's effectiveness was limited by regulations on the size of new lots created by S.B. 9 and a provision that required property owners to live on-site if they wanted to do a lot split. Local governments also piled fees, affordability requirements, and impractical design mandates to prevent S.B. 9 projects. "It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of local subversions with the law," Nolan Gray, legislative director of California YIMBY (and occasional Reason contributor), told Reason back in February. S.B. 677, written by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), attempts to fix these loopholes by ending owner-occupancy and lot-size requirements. It also limits local government fees and design requirements. Housing Near Transit Another longtime priority of California's YIMBY reformers has been allowing larger apartment buildings near transit stops. In 2018 and 2019, Wiener had introduced ambitious bills to do just that. Both failed in the Legislature, but those bills served as a conversation starter that's informed much of the subsequent debates around policy in the state. This year, Wiener is trying again with S.B. 79. The bill would establish state zoning standards that allow for up to seven-story apartment buildings within half a mile of train stations and major bus stations. The bill would also allow public transit agencies to develop housing on land that they control. Because current state law does not require housing built near transit stops to include parking spaces, housing allowed under S.B. 79 would effectively be exempt from minimum parking requirements. An Uncertain Future In the run-up to today's hearing, a wide range of interest groups issued letters opposing S.B. 677 and S.B. 79. Some of this opposition is unsurprising. The California League of Cities, which typically opposes any state preemption of local zoning powers, has come out against S.B. 677. In a letter to Wiener, the League says that the bill does too much to limit local governments' "flexibility" in regulating duplexes and lot splits. By limiting impact fees, the bill prevents local governments from recouping the costs of new development, the League says. More novel is the opposition of affordable housing developers to S.B. 79. In a letter sent last week to Wiener, a coalition of nonprofit builders registered their "strong concerns" with the bill. By not mandating that new developments near transit include affordable units, the bill "will lead to the production of market-rate housing near transit at the expense of affordable housing, rather than to the development of both in tandem," they wrote. Stacking the deck even more against S.B. 79 and S.B. 677 is the apparent hostility of Senate Housing Chair Aisha Wahab (D–Hayward). Wahab, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this month, has derided past state streamlining bills as "giveaways to developers." The state senator has frequently criticized efforts to exempt new housing projects from minimum parking requirements. Pro-housing lawmakers could try to "roll" Wahab by convincing other Democrats on the housing committee to vote in favor of housing bills over her objections. But as Politico notes, this is considered a confrontational move in the Legislature. If S.B. 79 and S.B. 677 do die in the Housing Committee, there's a chance that they could still be revived in another committee or brought directly to the floor by the Senate president pro tempore. Those would also be extreme measures. The Trump administration is reportedly considering cuts to the federal government's Section 8 housing voucher program. Also, the administration's rollback of fair housing regulations continues apace. A California housing bill that would exempt urban infill housing from the state's environmental review law passed out of a crucial Assembly committee yesterday. Tariffs continue to weigh heavily on U.S. homebuilders. Rising insurance costs and special assessments are making Florida's condo owners desperate to sell, reports The Wall Street Journal. The post California Housing Bills Face Crucial Hearing Today appeared first on
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alaska Senate approves payday alternative to checks and cash
Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, expresses frustration at a March 19, 2024, news conference the day after the legislature failed by one vote to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy's education-funding veto. Next to him is Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, a co-chair of the finance committee. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon) The Alaska Senate voted 19-0 on Monday to allow employers the ability to offer a special debit card on payday to employees who don't have a bank account. 'Senate Bill 79 is all about offering options for folks to be paid if they don't have a bank account,' said Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski and chair of the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee, which sponsored the bill. If enacted, SB 79 would allow employers to put an employee's wages onto a payroll card, similar to a credit or debit card, instead of paying an employee in cash or by check. The employee's permission would be required, and the employee must be notified of any fees or terms of use for the card. The card must be free to use at least once per pay period. Speaking on the Senate floor, Bjorkman said the card is a way for employees without a bank account to avoid check-cashing fees. An identical bill passed the House and Senate last year by wide, bipartisan margins but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it because the House passed it after the session deadline. SB 79 now advances to the House for consideration. Also on Monday, the Senate voted 19-0 to approve Senate Bill 60, which seeks to name May 12 as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Day of Recognition. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage. Sen. Donny Olson, D-Golovin, was excused absent. The bill goes to the House for further consideration. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
