The Weekly Rewind: Week of April 17th

House Floor Actions
April 20, 2023

This week, the House amended and sent back to the Senate, S. 120, legislation to keep confidential all Execution Team Member Identities as well as Lethal Injection Drugs and Related Materials Information. This bill would protect personal and other identifying information about any person, or entity, participating in the planning or administration of death sentence executions. This protected information would include, but not be limited to, names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers, social media information, and usernames. Also, to be protected would be information related to pharmacists, other healthcare professionals, and providers of lethal injection drugs for executions.

As amended by the House this week, no General Assembly member, a family member of a General Assembly member, or any business in which they hold a controlling interest as an owner, director, officer, or majority shareholder with voting rights or control over that business’s financial decisions, would be allowed to provide drugs, medical supplies, or medical equipment to be used for these executions. Also as amended by the House, the confidential information set out above could not be obtained by any means of legal compulsion, including, but not limited to, subpoenas, discovery rules, rules of civil procedure, or other disclosure processes by any entity that exercises the sovereign powers of our state. The Comptroller General, Treasurer, and Department of Corrections would have to coordinate on developing a system to keep all related purchases and expenditures in a deidentified status. The Department of Corrections would have to comply with all federal regulations applicable to bringing execution drugs into our state. Anyone revealing this confidential information, including information about execution team members or their families, would be facing up to three years in jail for doing so.

The House of Representatives concurred in Senate amendments to S. 604, a joint resolution authorizing American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) appropriations, and enrolled the legislation for ratification. From the funds disbursed to the state under the federal “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”, the legislation appropriates $586 million to the Rural Infrastructure Authority ARPA Water and Sewer Infrastructure Account to be used towards fulfilling existing grant applications. $100 million of this amount must be available for projects designated by the Secretary of Commerce as being significant to economic development and may be funded at up to twenty million dollars per project with no local match requirement. The legislation provides that the funds in the ARPA Resilience Account also may be used to mitigate the potential release of contamination associated with the USS YORKTOWN (CV-10), an asset of the Patriots Point Development Authority. The USS YORKTOWN project must be conducted in two phases that require review and comment by the Joint Bond Review Committee to finalize project cost and scope.

The House approved and sent the Senate H. 3255, the “Living Donor Protection Act.” This bill prohibits issuers of individual life insurance policies, group life insurance policies, disability income insurance policies, and long-term care insurance policies from discriminating against living organ donors. These insurers may not: (1) decline or limit coverage based solely upon someone’s status as a living organ donor; (2) preclude an insured from donating all or part of an organ as a condition of continuing to receive insurance coverage; or (3) discriminate in the offering, issuance, cancellation, amount of coverage, price, or any other condition of an insurance policy for a person, based solely and without any additional actuarial risks upon the individual’s status as a living organ donor.

The House approved and sent the Senate H. 4049, a bill authorizing remote shareholders meetings. The legislation revises requirements for holding meetings in provisions governing corporations, partnerships, and associations and provisions in the South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act to allow for remote participation instead of in-person attendance.

The House amended, approved, and sent the Senate H. 3769. This bill provides that the Department of Health and Environmental Control shall not deny a property owner the right to repair and replace any existing well or septic tank solely because of any other available water and/or sewer service.
The House approved and sent the Senate H. 3799, a bill designating the first Monday in March of each year as “Water Professionals Day” in South Carolina.

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