From the President’s Desk
Rep. Tom Oliverson MD, TX President – NCOIL President
Welcome to the third installment of my quarterly newsletter column. I hope everyone has been having a fantastic summer since we were all together in Costa Mesa last month for another successful NCOIL National Meeting. As I start my last quarter as NCOIL President, I’d like to reflect on what we’ve accomplished so far this year and the work that lays ahead for the rest of 2024.
From a membership perspective, we are seeing the hard work we’ve put in over the past several years come to fruition. Throughout our first two Meetings of 2024, we have seen participation from 114 legislators from 37 states and for 39 of those legislators, it was their first time attending an NCOIL National Meeting. For those of you who didn’t attend, you missed a great Meeting in a wonderful venue. That number is already higher than the legislator attendance seen across all three Meetings in both 2023 and 2022 which is truly illustrative of NCOIL’s growing national reach and prominence.
It wasn’t too long ago that NCOIL’s goal was to have legislator participation from just over half the states around the country throughout a whole year and now we are consistently exceeding that former goal achieved at every individual Meeting. Additionally, the number of first-time legislators seen so far this year is a really positive sign for NCOIL’s growing membership. Bringing more legislators from more states into NCOIL is essential in ensuring the Model Laws we are crafting incorporate viewpoints from all around the country.
In addition to the growth we have seen in our legislative membership this year, we also continue to make advances on the policy front on a wide range of timely and important issues. We’ve made great progress on the development of several Model Laws dealing with topics such as third party litigation financing, mental health parity, earned wage access providers, incentivizing homeowners to strengthen their homes against natural disasters, and value-based purchasing agreements between States and drug manufacturers. I look forward to rounding out those and other discussions in the near future in an effort to provide states with bipartisan legislative guidance.
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