Eggs & Issues focuses on Legislation

The Eggs & Issues Committee held their first breakfast of the year on March 16, featuring local Representative Monty Betts and Representative Jonathan Dismang.  The event was sponsored by Cintas-Searcy Division.  A special thanks to Danny Games and his committee for putting together the event.

Story below

Rep. calls for restructuring highway department
By Warren Watkins

Courtesy of the The Daily Citizen

Although money matters were the focus of the recent fiscal session of the Arkansas Assembly, one issue that was debated �” and put off until next year �” concerned how the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery would distribute its scholarships.

A report on the session was provided Tuesday by State Representatives Jonathan Dismang (Dist. 49) and Monty Betts (Dist. 50) who spoke at the Eggs and Issues meeting Tuesday morning at Harding University, sponsored by the Searcy Regional Chamber of Commerce. Senator John Paul Capps (Dist. 29) did not attend.

How the scholarships will be distributed is the focus of the debate, Betts said, with the current formula requiring a higher grade point average for students who come from schools with inflated grades as measured by the end-of-course exams. Betts, who said students are penalized if they come from a grade-inflated school, has been appointed to a task force to study what grade inflation in respect to the scholarship distribution.

In addition to distribution, other issues about the scholarships need clarified, Betts said.

“One of the misconceptions about the lottery scholarships is that these colleges are going to get rich. That isn’t so,” Betts said. “Tuition scholarships do not cover the cost of that students other than tuition. It benefits the student.”

Betts said the session was well run, addressing only issues with fiscal elements, a factor he attributed to the assembly’s leadership.

“The only policy issue that came up was grade inflation,” Dismang told the crowd of 150.

Speaker of the House Robbie Wills attended the breakfast, and said afterward that he was in favor of students passing the end-of-course exams before receiving lottery scholarships.

“What we’re going to have to do is get the focus on student achievement,” Wills said.

The distribution of the severance tax, also connected to revenue and budgeting, was a second issue addressed during the session, Dismang said, with an appropriation of money collected from natural gas wells.

“We finally got a portion of the five percent of the severance tax for impacted counties appropriated,” Dismang said.

The national debate over health care will impact Arkansas financially, Dismang said, because of the amount of money designated to support the Medicaid program. Co-pays for Medicaid recipients and regulation of use will have to be implemented, Dismang said, to keep the state budget balanced if federal cuts in Medicaid are carried through.

“We are going to have to deal with over-utilization or we’re going to be upside-down with Medicaid in seven years,” Dismang said.

Repayment or forgiveness of the $296 million the state borrowed from the federal government is problematic as well, Dismang said.

Dismang shared an opinion on how to develop the state’s infrastructure in response to a question to that effect by White County Judge Michael Lincoln: Overhaul of the part of state government that oversees building and repairing the state’s main roads.

“We’re going to have to restructure the highway department,” Dismang said.

The Arkansas Assembly is scheduled to convene in a plenary session in January.