Legislative Agenda
March 12, 2001
I am here today to announce my legislative agenda for 2001. I can tell you that there will not be a lot of surprises. In seeking the office I now hold, I made some promises to the people of Delaware. This legislative agenda shows that I intend to keep the promises I made.
Budget Priorities
As I said in my State of the State address, we face tough fiscal times that force us to make some tough choices about spending priorities. In deciding where to spend the limited dollars that will be available this year, I chose education and children.
My legislative agenda includes spending money in just three areas: reading specialists in our elementary schools, a pilot after-school program, and expanded services for foster children.
Once I have seen the state’s revised revenue estimates in the spring, I will also make a decision about what type of pay increase we can afford for our state employees. But let me describe each of my three budget priorities.
I have said before that I would like to place at least one reading specialist in each of Delaware’s elementary schools in this year’s budget. These specialists would work directly with our youngest schoolchildren who are having trouble reading. I firmly believe that the success of our children as they make their way through the school system rests on their reading skills. I want my first budget to reflect my desire to ensure that our children learn to read at an early age, so they can read to learn for the rest of their lives
I also want to invest more money this year in our foster care system. For many years, we have not invested enough in these foster children, who have been mistreated, neglected, or abandoned by their birth families. They are some of Delaware’s most vulnerable citizens, and we owe them more.
I will look at the recommendations of my foster care task force when it reports and to some recommendations from inside my administration to determine where to invest the limited funds we will have this year. I am determined to make progress on this front.
I also spoke a lot during my campaign about the importance of expanding the school day. I would rather keep students after school and help them catch up and pass our new statewide tests than see them in summer school as a result of failing those tests.
I will ask the legislature to set aside a pool of funds—either existing “extra time” money or new funds—for a pilot program in which elementary schools will be able to submit proposals to get funding for academically-oriented after-school programs. One of the factors in deciding which schools will get this money will be the schools’ efforts to get private funds from corporations and foundations, along with federal money.
This after-school program will be very small at the outset, perhaps limited to half a dozen schools. But it will serve as a model that we can replicate when our budget is more flexible.
Those are my main budget priorities for this year. As our revenue picture becomes more clear in the spring, I will make judgments about a state employee pay raise and other initiatives that I might like to fund but can’t responsibly promise at this time.
Patients Bill of Rights
I promised last year to fight for passage of a serious patient’s bill of rights, one that would guarantee important types of insurance coverage to Delawareans with health insurance and give Delawareans the tools to make sure that they got the health benefits they paid for.
With Senator Blevins and Representative Maier, we introduced that bill within days of being sworn into office.
Passing that bill is a priority for me, and I am counting on the legislature to respond to the overwhelming demand for improvement that I have heard from Delawareans.
Our patients’ bill of rights will guarantee that patients with primary care physicians can see specialists if necessary, guarantee that patients are covered for emergency room care, and guarantee that patients who purchase prescription drug options can get the prescription drugs their doctors think they need.
It will also speed up the process by which health insurance companies and HMOs must hear patients’ complaints, and it will require insurers to pay patients’ legal fees if the patients have to take their insurer to court and win.
A Cleaner Environment
I also promised during my campaign to crack down on environmental polluters. Part of my legislative agenda is to keep that promise.
Senator McBride and Representative Quillen have already introduced our legislation to expand the reporting requirements for companies that have created environmental hazards. Soon, I will seek a bill that requires water providers to provide ongoing information about the quality of our drinking water.
These two pieces of legislation will provide Delawareans with information they need about the quality of our air, water, and soil. Senator McBride, Representative Quillen and I are also seeking to expand Delaware’s ‘chronic violator’ statute. We want companies that violate the same environmental laws over and over again to face fines so high that they take extra steps to ensure that they avoid those violations.
The cancer task force that Senator Sharp, Speaker Spence and I created will soon begin its meetings, and it may recommend further steps relating to the quality of our environment.
I will take very seriously any recommendations I receive from the cancer task force, and would expect some of those recommendations become part of my 2002 legislative agenda.
Classroom Discipline
I mentioned at the outset that my commitment to education was reflected in my budget priorities. It will also be reflected by my introduction of another piece of legislation I promised during my campaign: a bill seeking to improve classroom discipline by protecting teachers from lawsuits that might be filed against them as a result of disciplining students.
Some teachers have told me that they are afraid to discipline students in the way they know they should, because they are threatened—sometimes by the students themselves—with lawsuits.
Senator Sokola, Representative Reynolds, and I will be introducing a bill later this week that will protect teachers from those types of lawsuits, so they can better enforce discipline in the classroom.
Public Safety
Public safety is also on my agenda for this year. I will support legislation to require background checks for persons purchasing guns at gun shows, in order to eliminate a current loophole. I will also introduce legislation that will require that part of the pre-sentence investigation for any person convicted of a felony be some effort to determine if that convicted felon owns a gun.
Finally, I will support the bills already introduced this year that seek to bring our driving under the influence statute into compliance with federal requirements. We need those bills passed not only to protect the public, but also to avoid losing substantial federal highway funds that we cannot afford to pass up in these leaner fiscal times.
Also under the heading of public safety, I will seek to create a funding mechanism that will allow us to make some technological changes to our 911 centers. This will allow 911 operators to know the instant they receive a call from a cell phone the location of the caller.
Child Welfare
As I mentioned earlier, my dedication to at-risk children is reflected in the fact that I have made foster care a budget priority. It will also be reflected by my support for a permanent guardianship statute in Delaware.
Right now, our adoption statute forces the state to make a stark choice between leaving children with blood parents who can’t take care of them, and completely severing those parents’ parental rights in a way that means they might never see their children again.
But in real life, it’s not always that simple. There are some cases where it is in a child’s best interests to be removed from his parents’ home, but still maintain a relationship with his parents.
A permanent guardianship statute would give the state more flexibility, and would allow us to remove children from parents who couldn’t care for them without completly severing the parent-child relationship.
I will support the passage of such a statute this year, and I think it will result in happier endings for a lot of at-risk children.
Making Government Work Better
My last legislative priority I am announcing today relates to a long-standing interest of mine: making government work better.
I have already asked Jack Markell to head up a task force to reform the Office of Information Services, and I will be seeking to make some of the changes that he recommends.
I am also going to form a similar task force this year to review the structure of the Department of Education, to see if we can operate that department in a more efficient fashion.
I have also asked my deputy legal counsel Joe Schoell and Personnel Director Lisa Blunt-Bradley to work with organized labor to see if there are ways that we can agree to revise our state’s personnel system, to make it less complicated and to help us to recruit employees in competitive industries.
Finally, I will ask the legislature to change the way it allocates money for web site and internet services, so that those services will be funneled through the state’s e-government task force.
This process change should encourage innovation by and coordination between our agencies in what they provide the web, and ensure that there is uniformity among state agencies with respect to the format of their web sites.
Agency Bills Early
My commitment to make government work better will also be reflected in the way that the executive branch interacts with the legislative branch.
In previous years, executive agencies introduced scores of quickly-written bills into the legislature during the last few weeks of the session. This year, I will not allow any agency to introduce any bill that has not been submitted to me for my approval by May 1, unless some extraordinary circumstances justify an exception. My administration will interact with the legislature in a respectful and organized way.
Conclusion
In the weeks to come, I will announce more details about some of the bills I’ve referred to today, as well as unveiling some bills that are still being prepared, such as my “Livable Delaware” agenda to address growth.
As you can see, the items I am focusing on in my legislative agenda are the ones I talk to the people of Delaware about – and that they talked to me about – last year. The emphasis is on education, families and the environment.
If the legislature works with me to enact my legislative agenda, I believe a year from now Delawareans will have better schools, a cleaner environment, safer children, and better health care. All these measures will improve our quality of life, which will make us attractive in economic development as we enter the next phase of the economy.
Accomplishing all this would be quite a beginning for me, and one that would fulfill my promises to the people. I look forward to working with the General Assembly to accomplish these goals.
Thank you.
