Arkansas Legislative Council Executive Subcommittee
December 19, 2024
Senator Terry Rice Thanks for being here. I call the Executive Subcommittee of the Arkansas Legislative Council to order. And I'm going to ask Senator Gilmore if he will lead us in a prayer. If you will all stand.
Senator Ben Gilmore [prayer]
Senator Terry Rice Thank you. I recognize co-chair Wardlaw for Item B for consideration of adoption of final recommendation on the firearm concealed carry law study.
Representative Jeff Wardlaw Thank you, Mr. Chair. Members, At our meeting on October 17, Representative Josh Miller presented the final report to draft legislation of the ALC Game & Fish State Police Subcommittee Firearms Study. We voted to adopt the recommendation of the draft legislation. Under the procedures for this study that were adopted by ALC in August of 2023, this subcommittee was tasked to consider the recommendations of the Game & Fish Subcommittee, making any revisions we feel needed and then providing final recommendations to the full ALC.
Based on the discussion of members in this subcommittee, I propose we send the full ALC all recommendations of the Game & Fish Subcommittee with the following two additions which are included in your packet. JLC152, which is a bill to prohibit local governments from regulating knives or knife making components. Before I read the second one, I will say that these bills were discussed in the Game & Fish Subcommittee. So these are not true new additions.
Section 21 of JLC174, which amends Arkansas Code 11-5-117 to allow an employee of a private employer to store his or her handgun in his or her vehicle in the parking lot of a private employer. Your packet includes an updated final report of the subcommittee, the report of the Game & Fish Subcommittee and draft bills as presented on October 17, JLC174 with the new section 221 and JLC152, which is the knife bill. At this time, Mr. Chair, I would move for adoption of these documents as final recommendations to the firearm and concealed carry law study of ALC. And I'd be happy to take any questions.
Senator Terry Rice Okay, members, we have a motion. Do we have any questions on the motion? If not, do I have a second? Second. All in favor say aye. Opposed. That is adopted. Next up, we have Representative Wooten is going to present a proposed amendment for the ALC Hospital Medicaid Study subcommittee. If you will go to the table and light your mic up. Ms. Thayer, if you want to go, you may have some questions, too. Representative Wooten, if you'll identify yourself for the record, please.
Representative Jim Wooten Jim Wooten, State Representative, District 59.
Jill Thayer Jill Thayer, Bureau of Legislative Research.
Senator Terry Rice Thank you. Mr. Wooten, you're recognized.
Representative Jim Wooten Representative Ladyman apologizes for not being able to be here today, but he's out of the country. He's in France and for a long planned visit, so he couldn't be here. But what we're recommending and asking for your consideration and recommendation to the Legislative Council is that the Hospital and Medicaid Committee that we have in the Legislative Council be renamed and it would read Hospital Medicaid and Developmental Disabilities Study Subcommittee. And that will relate to matters concerning protection and advocacy for individuals with developmental disabilities and examination of the activities of entities designated to carry out their duties in this state in regard to these institutions. So that would be our recommendation for your consideration.
Senator Terry Rice Okay. Thank you for that. Members, do you have any questions for Representative Wooten or Ms. Thayer. Not seeing any, I have a motion from Senator Hester and a second from Senator Irvin. No further discussion? A motion to adopt, yes. All in favor, aye. Opposed. That is adopted. Thank you.
Representative Jim Wooten Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Committee. Appreciate it.
Senator Terry Rice Okay, members. Next up, we have Mr. Kyle Hales from Perr & Knight is going to have a presentation for us. Thank you, sir, for being here. If you will state your name, who you with for the record.
Kyle Hales So I'm Kyle Hales. I'm a principal consulting actuary at Perr & Knight. I'm also the director of our Risk Strategies and Solutions department. So what we've done here is we've drafted two requests for proposals. They are for two different types of vendors. One is a captive manager and the other is for brokerage services. I'm assuming everyone has a copy of at least one of these. Okay.
Senator Terry Rice Yes.
Kyle Hales So I'll just go through this, fairly high level here. You know, it's a draft. If and when this becomes approved, we will remove the draft language. We start with just the table of contents, get into the introduction and the purpose. One of the main things here is a calendar of events, and that's on the fourth page or fifth page, depending on which file you're looking at. So tomorrow, again, if this receives approval, tomorrow would be the release of the proposal.
We're giving the vendors until three weeks. So that's until January 10th to respond in terms of any questions they have on the RFPs. A week later, we plan to address those questions. And by the 22nd, we asked the vendors to give us a notice of their intent to respond. From then, the responses are going to be due on the 31st. And the next week we will notify the vendors who are advancing to the next phase. And then a week after that, which is February 14th, is the release of the demonstration instructions for that next phase. So the roles and responsibilities, essentially it's going to be myself, my team at Perr & Knight essentially doing kind of the first set of releasing the RFP.
Also we will be doing the initial vetting. Our thought is that we would get maybe up to a dozen or so vendors that would respond to each of these. And our goal is to try to narrow this down to maybe 2 or 3 that the executive subcommittee could evaluate and essentially decide to move forward with and then we move on. So most of this just goes into kind of the rules and the requirements that we are asking of the vendors. Section 2 7 talks about the evaluation process and ultimately what we're going to be looking at from the features, the benefits and the approach, to the experience and qualifications of the vendors, to the references and ultimately the pricing as well. And it shows the weighting that we're going to use when we make the selections here.
And again, Perr & Knight's piece is just to go through and whittle the field of vendors down to probably the top two, three or possibly even four if there's four really good vendors that would fit the role. And from there then it would be up to the subcommittee to finalize the decision on the specific vendor. And then Section 3 just talks about the scope of services. These are a little bit different between the captive managers and the brokers.
But in essence, it's everything that we would need those vendors to do. 3 2 talks about the proposal format and exactly what we're looking for. And ultimately then in 3 2.7, these are some of the certifications and disclosures that we've asked for. There's a signature page at the end, so that's all I have.
Senator Terry Rice Okay, members, anyone have questions for Mr. Hales? You are recognized.
Representative Keith Brooks Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thanks again for all your work. Quick question, relative to the captive, are we still kind of looking at something similar to the state of Tennessee?
Kyle Hales In terms of the structure and everything, yes. That's exactly it.
Representative Keith Brooks Have we come to a number yet around what kind of the capitalization would be in terms of infusion of fund from the state initially?
Kyle Hales No, we have not finalized that yet. Just a quick update on that. We finished our actuarial study using data through 9/30, so we have a better feel for the potential claims and losses for the upcoming funding year. A lot of, though, the answer to that question is going to depend on the renewal terms that we get from the carriers on this. So we want to be able to find out exactly where the ideal place to put the captive will be. But it's likely the captive will retain a pretty significant amount of risk. I just can't comment at this time in terms of what the capital requirements would be. I was just going to say, we haven't gotten that far yet.
Representative Keith Brooks Follow up, Mr. Chair? Have you had a chance to look at all relative to FEMA and captives? So Tennessee is experiencing an issue right now on Helene specifically relative to some significant claims. And FEMA is not recognizing that they have a captive and that's causing some issues. I'm curious if we've gotten that far as well as far as claim payouts and potential situations.
Kyle Hales Yeah, it's on our to do list. Jill, I don't know if you want to talk about it in more detail.
Senator Terry Rice Go ahead.
Jill Thayer Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jill Thayer, Bureau of Legislative Research. Representative Brooks, I've reached out to get a contact with FEMA. That's the point that we're at. We are going to set up preliminary discussions with them prior to y'all drafting up your legislation just to find out what their concerns would be to make sure that y'all can take that into consideration as you move forward. So hopefully right after the first of the year we'll be able to set something up with them.
Representative Keith Brooks Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Senator Terry Rice Any more questions? Anything else you had, Mr. Hales?
Kyle Hales No, I did not.
Senator Terry Rice Without any further comment, I have a motion to adopt D1 and 2. I have a motion. I have a second. All in favor, aye. Opposed. It is adopted. Thank you for being here today. New members, I'll use other business. For mine, this is the last time I'll be chairing the Senate part of Exec, and Senator Gilmore will be taking that position over. It's been a privilege to do this for the Senate end for the last four years. I will continue to be on Council and I want to thank Staff Director Garrity and Miss Thayer and all that they do. I have said many times they make us all look good. They are very professional in what they do. Thank you for being here today. With no other business, we are adjourned.
