Interior designers are out of $$
The Arkansas House just failed to pass the $10,635 appropriation to the Board of Registered Interior Designers. The funds that were to be distributed to them are collected through registration costs of the board's members. Rep. Dan Greenberg took this board on last summer and spoke against the appropriation request. He'll now seek to have the board abolished. The bill received 60 votes for (30 votes against), but it needed 2/3's approval from the full body.
Update: And yes, as I always do, I voted against the War Memorial Stadium Commission appropriation. If we're against wasteful spending in government, nothing is more wasteful than spending $5,000,000+ in taxpayer money to play two football games annually in a dilapidated stadium (and one is normally against some double directional non-conference gimme). That's 500 times the size of the interior designers' budget.
Update II: Paul's Law, the proposal to prohibit texting while driving, passed by a vote of 78 for, 12 against, and 1 voting present. Rep. Mark Martin spoke against the bill on the basis that it is a primary offense, meaning that drivers can be specifically pulled over for texting while driving. Drivers can only be cited for secondary offenses when stopped for another valid reason.
Update: And yes, as I always do, I voted against the War Memorial Stadium Commission appropriation. If we're against wasteful spending in government, nothing is more wasteful than spending $5,000,000+ in taxpayer money to play two football games annually in a dilapidated stadium (and one is normally against some double directional non-conference gimme). That's 500 times the size of the interior designers' budget.
Update II: Paul's Law, the proposal to prohibit texting while driving, passed by a vote of 78 for, 12 against, and 1 voting present. Rep. Mark Martin spoke against the bill on the basis that it is a primary offense, meaning that drivers can be specifically pulled over for texting while driving. Drivers can only be cited for secondary offenses when stopped for another valid reason.
posted by Steve Harrelson @ 1/29/2009 01:54:00 PM | Permalink |
1 Comments:
Rep. Harrelson,
Thank you for mentioning this, it gives me the opportunity to explain more completely.
If you will notice, I couldn't even bring myself to vote "NO" on the bill because of the fact that I believe that what Rep. Kidd is trying to do is a good and right thing. (I did not vote.) As you correctly stated, my problem had more to do with how the enforcement was to be accomplished as a primary offense.
I wondered if it should not be made a secondary offense. I felt we would be assigning a duty to our police to enforce something that would be very difficult to accomplish. I fear we may often make their job unnecessarily difficult and leave them to face the consequences alone.
On the other hand since the floor discussion, I have been informed that it might be far better to be cited for a simple class C misdemeanor than what would result from any normally associated primary offence PLUS the secondary offence of texting. This is a very valid point, the end result of my initial suggestion seems rather severe.
As you know, but your readers may not, legislators are not always sure of the best course of action even after we have pushed that voting button. Perhaps Rep. Kidd was right.
Luckily, when any one of us is unsure, we can usually at least take comfort in the fact that the combined wisdom of 100 is more often correct than not.
Sincerely,
Rep. Mark Martin
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