Legislative Report

OIADA tracks all bills which are or could become a concern to the used motor vehicle industry during each legislative session. In recent years, there are as many as 3,000 bills and resolutions introduced during a legislative session. Many of those are in the areas of law that independent dealers operate under and could be amended to impact your business. We monitor all those bills, however we only list in our Reports to you those bills that we believe can or will have a direct impact upon you and/or your business.

This is a service that your membership dues help to pay for.

In addition, our lobbyist, Jami Longacre, is well known and respected at the Capitol. She and her associates do a terrific job for dealers.

THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE NOT MEMBERS ARE NOT PROVIDING YOUR SHARE OF SUPPORT FOR THIS SERVICE! WE INVITE YOU TO JOIN NOW AND HELP US HELP YOU!

If you desire more information on any bill that is being considered by the Legislature, whether it is one that we list or some other bill of interest to you, email the OIADA office and we will email the information to you. It's important that we have your email address.

Legislative Report

It took some hard work and a good bit of explaining to legislators the effects that a number of bills which were proposed this legislative session would have on the industry. But the efforts of our lobbyist, Jami Longacre, and your OIADA staff bore fruit when all of the bills that we opposed were declared "dead" just six weeks into the session.

Following are two of the more significant bills that your Association persuaded legislators to kill:

HB 2651, a bill to license and regulate repair shops that would have required techs to be certified in each category of work that they performed, and to take 30 hours of continuing education every year in order to maintain their certification. This bill would have been a very costly process to any dealer who maintained a repair facility. Among the few exemptions to the bill were franchise dealer shops, those techs who worked for free, fleet dealers and those who did farm related repairs. A repair shop that failed to license or maintain its license was subject to having its utility services cut off!

Then, HB 3398, a bill to abolish the Used Motor Vehicle and Parts Commission and merge the staff and that Commission's money and functions with the Oklahoma Motor Vehicle Commission would have stripped the used motor vehicle industry of all its representation on that body. Neither commission wanted this merger. Both these agencies are self funded. Fees paid by the industries cover the cost of their operations plus, the state requires that 10% of their funds go to the state General Fund. The bill would have required a 5% reduction in personnel and it called for a 50% increase the amount of contributions going to the state. This increase would have required an increase in our licensing fees. No one wanted that. We succeeded in killing this bill in Committee on a vote of 11 to 3.

Two other bills that died were bills which would have reinstated the state motor vehicle inspection program. One would have cost the public $5 per inspection and the other would have cost $10 for an inspection.

Four bills that we are following are still alive and moving. They are:

• HB 3162, a bill that clarifies the exemption of consignment auctions from the effects of the salvage pool sale bill that was passed last year - this bill passed the House 99 to 0;
• SB 1389, a bill that defines an "unrecovered-theft vehicle" as a vehicle that has been stolen and not recovered, and creates a certificate of title for such a vehicle - Passed the Senate on a vote of 44 to 0;
• SB 1727, a bill that adds "utility vehicles" to the definition of motor vehicle - this bill passed the Senate on a vote of 26 to 19 - the title is off the bill, which means that it will have to go back to the Senate before final passage; and,
• SB 1804, a bill that creates a lien for wrecker, accident site clean-up and vehicle storage companies that provide services for any person who suffers vehicle damage and asserts a claim against a third party for the damages - Passed the Senate on a vote of 46 to 0. Title is off the bill.

While more than 2,000 new bills were filed at the start of the 2008 session, many failed to jump the first hurdle - a committee hearing, and others failed to make the second hurdle - the March 13 deadline for hearings of bills from their house of origin. With the passage of those deadlines, 2,835 bills from the combined 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions have been dubbed as having "failed deadline".

However, that notation of failure does not necessarily preclude the survival of the authors' language. The House Democratic Caucus issued a news release lamenting the failure of many of their bills to receive a committee hearing, and Democratic Leader Danny Morgan of Prague said those ideas are not dead. The language may yet be attached to active bills as amendments. In the Senate, some amendments containing language from bills not heard in committee have already been attached to active bills. That means that even though we may have been successful in killing some of the bills that are not favorable to the industry, we cannot afford to let our guard down until the legislature has adjourned and the legislators have gone home. The sine die adjournment date is midnight, May 30^th. Even with that deadline, we have known legislators to "cover the clock" if they don't have their work finished by midnight. At any rate, we will monitor their actions until they've wrapped up the session and left the Capitol.