Legislative Updates 2021: April 12-16

Week 14 in the Statehouse

Highlights:

• Deep Dive: The Contested Calendar
• DHEC and Santee Cooper Update
• New Bills
• EV Charging Infrastructure advances
• Action Centers

There are four weeks left in the 2021 Legislative Session. The full Senate Finance Committee will take up the State Budget this week (H. 4100 and H. 4101). You can watch the meeting on Tuesday here, starting at 10am. The State Board of Economic Advisors is now estimating that South Carolina will have $1.7 billion more in revenues available at the beginning of the next fiscal year (July 1). These funds will be in addition to increased federal aid. Read more here. The Senate is planning to debate the budget on the floor the week of April 26 before sending it back to the House, where it will be revised to reflect the increased funding.

Deep Dive: The Contested Calendar

The Senate has a unique tool — Rule 32B — that can be used to slow a bill down if a Senator has concerns that need to be addressed. Under this rule, a Senator can place his or her name on a bill, and this action moves that bill to the Contested Calendar where it stalls. Any Senator can only have their name on five bills at any given time. You can view each day's calendar here, and you can see which bills are contested on any particular day. At the end of the bill's summary, the contested bills state "Contested by Senator __). However, in the final two weeks of session (almost upon us), a bill can be pulled to the floor from the Contested Calendar by majority vote of the Rules Committee. See who is on the Rules Committee here. The House does not have this unique provision.

DHEC and Santee Cooper Update

The hearing for S. 2 — the DHEC Breakup Bill — scheduled for April 7 that was postponed until April 14 has been postponed once again to April 21, 30 minutes after the Senate adjourns. You can (hopefully) watch the livestream here. Read more about this bill here.

S. 464, the Santee Cooper reform bill, will likely get significant floor time this week. In an interesting twist, on April 15 NextEra sent a letter to Senate President Harvey Peeler reaffirming their interest in purchasing Santee Cooper and indicating they have revised their proposal and want to discuss it with leadership. This will impact nature of the floor debate (almost certainly by design).

New Bills

S. 751 was filed this week by Senator Harpootlian and tweaks the language in the Energy Freedom Act dealing with the concept of cost shift.

H. 4149 the Utility Whistleblower bill, filed by House Labor, Commerce and Industry Chairman Bill Sandifer, makes it unlawful for a public utility to retaliate against an employee whistleblower.

Heading to the finish line

S. 304, Electric Vehicle Charging Stations, is getting a House Labor, Commerce and Industry subcommittee hearing on Wednesday at 9am. You can watch it here. We are very excited about this bill and the prospect that passage will add more EV charging infrastructure to South Carolina's transportation corridors.

House bills that made crossover and await a hearing in the Senate:

• H. 3524 Liquid petroleum pipelines eminent domain moratorium extension
• H. 4035 Electronic waste recycling sunset extension
• H. 4062 Public Service Commission Third Party Experts

Action Centers

H. 3120 Trails Tax Credit Bill ACTION CENTER.
H. 3979 Solar HOA Bill ACTION CENTER.
H. 3514 PFAS Bill ACTION CENTER. Deep Dive on PFAS here. PFAS Lobby Week webinar featuring Upstate Forever's Clean Water Advocate Megan Chase here.

Until next week...

Shelley Robbins
Energy and State Policy Director

ODDS AND ENDS AND ACTIONS:

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