Positive steps and long list of positive reforms

March 9, 2023

By District 1 Representative Sage Dixon

This week featured a total of 45 bills voted upon in the House, including several pieces of legislation aimed at reforming the state's selection procedure for financial service providers and our criterion for awarding state contracts. This is aimed at addressing the growing prevalence of certain subjective and irresponsible investment practices known as "environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing," These several bills, while not a complete solution, are a step in the right direction to continue fiscally responsible management of tax dollars.

A few other notable reforms include the much-needed (and broadly sensationalized) addition of the firing squad as an alternative method of execution when lethal injection is unavailable, and a relevant prohibition upon foreign governments buying agricultural or natural resource land.

The house has also approved a new path forward for interstate telehealth through an official recognition of out-of-state licenses, and as a final highlight a new property tax transparency requirement was passed in the House, which would give all property owners the right to obtain from their county assessor a copy of their valuation calculations.

Those are some positive steps that we saw last week, and a long list of promising reforms passed by the House now wait their turn for a potential hearing in the Senate ... at a time when both bodies are necessarily picking up their pace to account for the volume of legislation transferred from the other, we hope to add just a few more vital bills and get them all the way to the Governor's signature in these next few weeks.

May God bless this work with good and real results!