Arkansas interest groups expect lawmakers to address Medicaid, prisons, farming curriculum in regular sessions

With the regular legislative session starting today, Arkansas lobbyists and advocacy groups are expecting lawmakers to address issues that range from Medicaid reimbursement rates to farming lessons in elementary schools.

As hospitals struggle to manage rising costs, adjusting the state’s Medicaid rates is a priority for the Arkansas Hospital Association. Inpatient reimbursement rates haven’t changed since 2007 when they were raised from $675 a day to $850. Outpatient rates have stayed the same since 1992, said Jodiane Tritt, vice president of the association.

“So if you have open-heart surgery and are a Medicaid patient, the hospital is reimbursed $850 a day,” she said during an interview Friday.

In recent years, Tritt said hospitals have seen personnel and treatment costs increase between 20% and 40%.

Tritt is an element of how lawmakers might change rates but said the state Department of Human Services was conducting a rate review of the state program. The review was initiated by an executive order from outgoing Gov. Asa Hutchison.

“Once we have that, we hope we can work with DHS to come up with a solution that is beneficial to hospitals,” Tritt said.

Expanding access to secure drop-off locations where parents can relinquish babies without identifying themselves is a top priority for Arkansas Right to Life, said Rose Mims, executive director of the organization.

Like every other state in the US, Arkansas has a Safe Haven law that allows people to safely surrender newborns without risk of prosecution. These laws are intended to discourage parents from abandoning their infants in locations where the children could be harmed.

Since 2019, Arkansas has allowed for the anonymous surrender of infants 30 days or younger in drop-off boxes — also known as safe haven baby boxes. Currently, Mims said, these boxes are permitted at hospitals, law enforcement offices and fire departments that are staffed 24 hours a day.

In the coming session, Mims hopes lawmakers will expand the statute to include more types of fire departments.

“We know that some of these volunteer fire departments have an EMT support system that is close by that could accommodate the care of the newborn if nobody is in the fire department,” she said Thursday. “We’ve just expanded the definition of what requirements they would have to meet to be able to have a safe haven baby box at their fire department.”

Three babies have been safely surrendered in Arkansas since the law change in 2019. Mims said each of the newborns was placed in the custody of the state Department of Human Services and adopted.

For the Arkansas Farm Bureau, one priority is expanding agricultural education in elementary schools. The bureau, which represents agricultural interests and rural Arkansas, expects the voluntary pilot program to be available to students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

The proposed curriculum would include everything from how farms operate to where milk comes from, said Stanley Hill, a lobbyist with the bureau. The initiative was advanced by the bureau’s members, who include farmers and leaders in the agricultural sector.

“Our members believe that fact-based education programs should exist in our elementary schools,” he said Wednesday.

The initiative is modeled after a program from Georgia, said Steve Eddington, vice president and spokesman for the bureau. Members are expected to see the curriculum endorsed by state law, Hill said Friday.

A leading education priority for the Reform Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group, is expanding student access to various schooling models. One way for lawmakers to accomplish this would be to adopt an education savings account program for the state, said Laurie Lee, chair of the Reform Alliance board who also runs a consulting firm called Trace Strategies.

An education savings account is an account that functions much like a health savings account but for educational needs. Lee said several other states have adopted these accounts, which allow parents and students to set aside funds for private school tuition, summer enrichment programs and specific educational needs such as hearing aids and reading materials in braille.

In Arizona, parents may opt for an Empowerment Scholarship Account which provides 90% of the state funding that would otherwise be allocated to the school district or charter school for the qualified student, according to the Arizona Department of Education website.

Many interest groups in the days before the state chambers were set to meet the expected criminal justice, workforce development and tax cuts to top the Capitol’s agenda. While details on coming legislation remained sparse, these priorities closely mirrored those alluded to by lawmakers and Gov.-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Expanding bed space in state prisons is among the most pressing criminal justice issues for the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association, said Scott Bradley, executive director. With county jails overcrowded with state prisoners, Bradley said sheriffs are having trouble finding space in their facilities for people with misdemeanors.

While Bradley was a Tuesday element of how many lawmakers might consider adding to state prisons, he said county jails were backed up with roughly 2,000 state prisoners.

In February, sheriffs from across the state told lawmakers that overcrowding jails had reached a crisis point. Along with pushing their facilities beyond capacity, holding state prisoners created a safety issue for other detentions and detention staff, county officials said. Reimbursement offered by the state also weren’t enough to cover the cost of holding prisoners, the sheriffs said.

In November, the Arkansas Board of Corrections allowed state officials to start looking for a site to build a new prison. Solomon Graves, outgoing secretary of the Department of Corrections, said the state prison system had a capacity of 17,506 beds. If the state’s inmate population continued to grow each year by 1.3%, the state would need an additional 2,200 beds by 2032.

Arkansas last built a prison in 2003. Since 2015, Bradley said, Arkansas county facilities added a total of 2,154 beds.

“Counties have been adding beds at a significant rate,” he said. “It’s time for the state to catch up.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas is opposed to prison expansion plans and instead supports measures designed to keep Arkansans out of lockups. The state could reduce its incarceration rate by investing in education, housing, job opportunities and mental health substance use programs, said Sarah Everett, policy director for the ACLU of Arkansas.

“All these things are reasons people end up in the criminal justice system,” she said. “If we want to deal with the crime rate, we have to address the reason.”

The ACLU of Arkansas was also concerned with how the state would staff new prisons given that other facilities were understaffed, said Everett.

EDUCATION

Supporting education efforts, especially when it comes to improving literacy rates, tops the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce’s agenda heading into the session.

“That’s just job one, getting public school performance tremendously improved in terms of literacy and numeracy,” said Randy Zook, president of the chamber. “We just can’t make the progress we need to make without real improvement in those areas.”

Increasing literacy is one of the six priorities listed in Sanders’ acronymic LEARNS education plan. The other five are empowering parents, holding educators accountable, improving student readiness, expanding high-speed internet and prioritizing school safety, according to Sanders’ campaign site.

Zook also hopes to see updates on technical training and career education for Arkansas high school students. While some parts of the state, including Fort Smith and Saline County, had made improvements to their offerings, Arkansas generally lagged behind, Zook said.

“We’re way behind on that,” he said. “We offer some things in most places in the state but it’s not up to date … it’s not with current equipment.

By boosting technical training programs, Zook said, the state could open avenues to higher-paying jobs for Arkansans now stuck earning low wages. These newly trained workers could then alleviate the workforce shortage plaguing Arkansas businesses.

“This is the biggest issue facing nearly every business in the state,” Zook said. “We don’t have enough people who are prepared and capable of doing the work that’s available in a lot of places.”

Lobbyist Blake Eddins stressed during a panel discussion Tuesday the importance of training Arkansans for incoming jobs. Eddins said he represented US Steel Corp., which announced plans for a new $3 billion steel mill in Osceola scheduled for completion in 2024.

“Right now, the people are there. They want jobs,” he said. “We have got to give them the opportunity to be able to step into these jobs.”

TAXES

Cutting the corporate income tax rate was a top goal for business interest groups. Both Zook and Shannon Newton, president of the Arkansas Trucking Association, prioritized lowering the corporate rate of 5.3% to the current top individual income tax rate of 4.9%.

If corporate rates were to be cut, Newton said it would be important for lawmakers to ensure all types of corporations received equal treatment.

“We just want to monitor and make sure the corporate tax rate is trending down at a similar pace so you’re not disincentivizing a particular type of business,” she said. “You don’t want to get into a situation where … companies are not playing on similar fields.”

Sanders has said repeatedly that she would begin phasing out the state income tax and indicated cuts would have to be done in a responsible manner over time.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Wickline and Stephen Simpson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.