Governor Vetoes Safety Reimbursement Plan

Governor Greg Abbott has vetoed a bill that would have created a safety reimbursement fund for small employers and certain high-risk industries. Supporters have maintained that the bill would give businesses more incentive to make their workplaces safer because they will be able to receive reimbursement for certain costs to implement small but important changes. The Governor’s veto message calls the measure unnecessary and calls for smaller government.

CSHB 2466, by Rep. Nicole Collier (D – Fort Worth), passed the Senate in a record vote on May 20, 2015. It was scheduled to take effect September 1, 2015. But the Governor signed his veto of the bill on June 19, 2015, writing:

One way for government to grow is by the addition of large, high-profile new state programs. That kind of government growth is easy to spot and relatively simple to guard against. Perhaps more often, however, government growth takes place through the accumulation over time of many small additions to the bureaucratic state. Each one may seem like a benign, low-cost effort to address discrete problems thought to be facing society. But when viewed together, they amount to a massive expansion of the size, scope, and cost of government. Once in place, these programs tend only to get bigger and more costly. Many people come to rely on or become financially interested in the program’s continued existence, which makes it difficult to reduce in size, much less eliminate.

House Blll2466 creates just such a program. Texas has been doing pretty well without a safety reimbursement program run by the Department of Insurance. To stay strong, we should resist the needless growth of government even in small ways.

The program created under CSHB 2466 would have reimbursed eligible employers for expenses incurred “to facilitate safe and healthy workplaces for their employees.” An eligible employer would have received no more than $5,000 per year in reimbursement for allowable expenses, including physical modifications to the worksite, safety equipment, and safety training for employees. The bill would have required the commissioner to fund the program with administrative penalties collected by the DWC. The commissioner would have been required to deposit annually the first $100,000 of those penalties into the general revenue fund to the credit of the Texas Department of Insurance operating account. Money for the program could only have been spent by the division, on appropriation by the Legislature, for the purposes of implementing the program, and only to the extent that funds are available.

This is the first veto by Governor Abbott of a workers’ compensation bill that was passed by the 84th Legislature.