Carbon capture bill selected as priority

Last week and early this week, things continued to be busy around here. Committees were busy meeting in executive session, trying to advance bills so that senators could decide on what bill they would like to prioritize for the session. Each senator can prioritize one bill and each committee can prioritize up to two bills.

Usually, a senator does not like to prioritize a specific bill until they know it has the votes to get out of committee because if it does not and there aren’t enough votes to pull the bill out of committee then they have wasted their priority bill for the year. Having priority bill status means that those bills will be heard on the Legislative floor for debate before other bills that do not have priority bill status.

I chose LB 650, introduced by Mike Flood from Norfolk, as my personal priority bill for this session. This bill would create the Nebraska Geologic Storage of Carbon Dioxide Act.

I have gone into more detail about this bill in a previous article but basically, this bill would give statutory authority to establish intent to facilitate carbon capture in Nebraska.

There are other ways for non-controversial bills to jump the line in front of non-prioritized bills. You can ask for a speaker priority, the Speaker of the Legislature usually chooses 25 bills to group together, these are bills that will not take a lot of time on floor debate and that do not need substantive amendments to them. I asked for LB 336 to be considered to be a speaker priority. The Speaker received a number of requests so I will let you know if it gets chosen as one of them.

The Natural Resources Committee chose LB 507 as one of their committee priority bills. This is a bill that I have written about in a past article. In the bill, they amended two of my bills, LB 190 and LB 191. The Transportation and Telecommunications Committee chose my bill, LB 215, as one of their committee priority bills.

This bill would allow Douglas County to raise the surcharge on landlines and also on wireless users to help with costs associated with their 911 system, this bill does not affect any other county.

Please feel free to contact my office with any questions or concerns that you might have. My email address is dhughes@leg.ne.gov and my phone number is (402) 471-2805. My office is room 2108 at the Capitol if you are in the Lincoln area.

You can read more about bills and other work of the Legislature at www.nebraskalegislature.gov, and you can click on the Live Video Streaming NET logo to watch the session, hearings, and other Capitol events.