Sen. Bo Watson previews 2024 Tennessee legislation
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — The Tennessee state legislature returns on Tuesday, January 9th at noon for the second half of the 113th general assembly.
1,500 bills or more will be introduced.
However, only a small percentage of these bills will actually pass and become law.
Senator Bo Watson previews what he expects in state legislation this year.
Sen. Bo Watson discusses TN legislation before meetings resume on Tuesday. Image courtesy of the Tennessee General Assembly official website.
“You know, if you really want to know what the state’s priorities are, you look at the budget. Where we spend our money is what our priorities are. That’s no different than if you look at a family’s budget. What a family’s priorities are you will see reflected in their family budget,” TN District 11 (R) Senator Bo Watson said.
Watson said Tennessee legislation finished 2023 a little over 300 million dollars short in their projected budget.
This will be the first time in about a decade the assembly will have to make harder decisions to determine how taxpayers money will be spent.
He mentioned a prime focus for the legislation will be crime and public safety, especially after the Covenant School shooting of last year.
The senator also addressed repeat offenders in Chattanooga and how legislation is planning on addressing criminal justice in that area.
“Over the past two years, especially since last year, the legislature has taken a really close look at public safety and school safety… and criminal justice reform. I think those three topics you can really kind of put them all in the same bucket. Those will continue to be top-shelf issues to the legislature… Here’s the challenge around those, all of those tend to have expensive price tags. So, in a year when you’re trying to monitor your expenses a little more closely than maybe ordinarily, you have to look closely at those and how you are using those resources around our criminal justice, public safety, school safety system,” Watson said.
He said this meeting will pick up from where lawmakers left off in the special session at the end of last summer.
At the end of that session, only four bills were passed out of many that were filed.
The senate felt some of those bills needed more debate than the special session would allow.
“We expect all those bills to come back and the legislature to have a robust conversation and debate about the various pieces of legislation,” Watson said.
The senator explained prime topics that will be discussed relate to education, public safety and healthcare.
These branch off into categories like mental health and more specific educational scholarships proposed by Governor Bill Lee.
While the legislature’s top agenda will be state revenues, the Governor’s prime agenda is educational freedom and school choice for students.
“Obviously when it comes to educational scholarships for K-12 education, there’s different opinions about that. Some people believe that — although I disagree with them — that it’s an attack on public education — it’s really not — it’s to just give families an opportunity to choose what education fits their child’s needs best. That will be a good, thorough debate. Much of the legislation we will see early in the session is legislation that was filed during the special session back at the end of summer,” Watson said.
The top of the agenda will be the budget and state revenues.
Senator Watson broke down their agenda to six key points:
Legislative Focus:
- Budget and the State’s Revenues
- Public Safety/School Safety/Crime and Criminal Justice Reform
- Education Freedom Scholarships/School Choice (Gov. Lee’s Prime Agenda)
- Improving access to health care, especially Mental Health
- Business Franchise and Excise Tax Reform
- Illegal Immigration (A Federal responsibility but impacting state and local governments’ budgets).
“Despite the polarization that people feel exists in the political system, there is still a lot of good, civil discourse that occurs in state government. At the end of the day, different from our federal friends, we have to pass a balanced budget. We don’t have a choice. We can’t do continuing resolutions and not address the budget challenges that we may or may not have. Our federal friends don’t have that problem. So, that’s why some of their issues go on year over year. Because they never really are forced to address them. We don’t have that luxury,” Watson said.
“So, one of the things that’s great about state government, and why I enjoy it so much, is that there is a time pressure on us to come to a decision about an issue. That means we have to talk to both our supporters and our opponents about the issue so we can come to a resolution… Because we don’t have the luxury of just moving it through a continuing resolution. We have to decide if we’re going to pay for it, and if we’re going to pay for it, how are we going to pay for it… And what are we not going to do if we pay for something? So that’s one of the beauties of state government. There’s a lot more civil discourse that occurs at the state level… And that doesn’t mean there’s not vigorous debate, because there is. But there’s a lot more discourse that occurs at the state level than there does at the federal level. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy serving in state government so much.”
The senator did affirm his faith in the budget: “The good news is, we have done a really good job at budgeting conservatively. So we have the resources to handle any kind of slowdown in our economy. Now, I want to be careful about that because while the economy has some headwinds on it, we are still doing in Tennessee amazingly well. We are outpacing the rest of the nation in our economic growth. It’s just not as robust as we thought it was going to potentially be. But it’s still very good. Things are still very good. And it’s good to be a Tennessean and it’s great to live in Tennessee.”
Legislators will return to Nashville this week to start their deliberations.
