MORGANTOWN – Every year, many bills fall by the wayside. Some are loved, some are hated.
Here’s a look at some that died this year.
Perhaps the most prominent was HB 4004, the bill to ban abortions past 15 weeks’ gestation. House Health took it up and passed it on the second day of the session. It sat in House Judiciary for close to a month, and the full House passed it Feb. 15.
It came to the Senate and sat for nearly another month. Senate Health passed it Friday, Day 59 of the session, and it was brought to the floor for a first reading.
Supporters and followers, probably both, wondered what was going on as the bill sat on the Senate calendar on second reading Saturday. Apparently, nothing much was going on, because that’s where it stayed – and died.
HB 4005, to ban the sale of fetal parts resulting from induced abortions, made progress until Feb. 16, when Senate Health moved it without any recommendation. It made a halfhearted appearance on the House floor on March 9, seeing a first reading and then getting buried back in Judiciary.
SB 493 was the bill to require all county school board meetings to be open to the public in person and via audio and video broadcast that would be archived on the board website. It died on Day 60, a victim of conflicting House and Senate amendments.
SB 653 was the bill to make Pierpont Community and Technical College a Division of Fairmont State University. The House amended it to transfer Pierpont’s aviation maintenance technology program to FSU. It died on Day 60 with no response from the Senate.
HB 4845 establishes the Katherine Johnson Academy and the Katherine Johnson Scholarship Fund to help qualified high school students take accelerated classes with dual college credit. The Senate amended it and the House let it die on the last day.
HJR 104 proposes a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of office for secretary of state; auditor; treasurer; attorney general and commissioner of agriculture to three. The Senate amended it and it died back in the House.
HB 4111 began as a bill to allow advance practice registered nurses and physician assistants to prescribe Schedule II drugs for up to three days. But the Senate Christmas-treed it with a PEIA Medicare bill; the House re-amended it and it died in the Senate.
SB 2 was a bill to index the number of weeks to the unemployment rate. SB 3 was a bill to stiffen up work-search requirements. Both faced doom in the House (SB 2 was on third reading in the House but was moved to the inactive calendar), so the Senate Christmas-treed them into SB 543, an unemployment fraud bill, and the House let that one die, too.
HB 4007, the House plan to phase out the personal income tax, never saw the light of day in the Senate.
SB 480 and SB 613, two bills to provide more funding to the Office of Oil and Gas to hire more well inspectors died in the House.
SB 229, to require an impact statement before school consolidations, died in the House.
SB 541, to reduce regulation on academic assessment filings for homeschoolers, died in the House.
Two COVID-related bills, HB 4071, dealing with school COVID mask and quarantine mandates, and HB 4320, dealing with vaccine exemptions based on natural immunity, died in the Senate.
HB 4293 aimed to make it illegal for any state or local election official to mail or deliver an absentee ballot application without a specific request from the voter. It died in the Senate.
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