FPCA Auto Division: The Miami Herald Reports PIP Amendment To Be Removed From Budget
May 2, 2011
The Miami Herald has reported that an amendment placed into the Budget that would have repealed the Personal Injury Protection (“PIP”) contingency risk multiplier to calculate attorneys’ fees will be removed.
The Miami Herald blog posting is reprinted below.
Should you have any questions or comments, please contact Katie Webb (kwebb@cftlaw.com) at Colodny Fass.
Budget update: sneaky PIP move out, conforming bill backlash
Reported by Marc Caputo for The Miami Herald
May 2, 2011
There’s an increasingly uneasy sense in the Florida Senate that lawmakers are using obscure budget “conforming bills” to push agendas well outside the budget. Because they’re joint House-Senate work products, the conforming bills are essentially like the budget: take it or leave it. They can’t really be amended once they’re printed, unless lawmakers want to delay the end of session.
So lawsmakers say they’re going to try to make it right.
The decision Sunday, for instance, to add the substance of Personal Injury Protection tort reform legislation to the budget will likely be pulled out today, said Senate budget chief JD Alexander.
“It shouldn’t be in the budget,” Alexander said. “We need to fix that.”
Another issue, growth management, will remain in a conforming bill that hadn’t yet hit the Senate floor, but Sen. Mike Bennett said the growth-management bill he proposed will come to the Senate floor and will be voted on. He said it would likely have passed anyway, so he doesn’t know why the House insisted on tacking its growth-management legislation in the conforming bill.
“This isn’t a good process — forcing up-or-down votes on major pieces of legislation without much input,” said Bennett, the Senate’s pro tem.
Sen. John Thrasher, the sponsor of a bill to stop unions from automatically collecting dues from worker paychecks, said he was opposed to adding it to a conforming bill. And it wasn’t — despite the claims from union officials.
“Something like this needs to be fully vetted,” Thrasher said. A House Speaker more than a decade ago, Thrasher said the number of conforming bills has grown out of hand.
“We need to take a step back and look at this,” Thrasher said.
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