This Act updates the statute on disclosure of pupil records to ensure compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”), 20 U.S.C. § 1232g, and improve information sharing between educational institutions and programs operating in this State, including local postsecondary institutions and programs and local education agencies, and the Department of Education (“Department”). Specifically, the Act does the following: (1) Provides that educational records of students, and personally identifiable information contained therein, may only be disclosed or redisclosed in accordance with FERPA and its implementing regulations. (2) Allows local education agencies and educational institutions and programs who outsource their data exchange and compliance with reporting requirements to the Department to consider the Department a school official as defined by FERPA regulations. This allows educational institutions and programs to disclose to the Department, without parental consent, information necessary for federal and state reporting when there is a legitimate educational interest. (3) Gives the Department authority to redisclose educational records for the purposes of ensuring the effectiveness of publicly funded programs and improving educational outcomes for students. Like initial disclosures, redisclosures must comply with FERPA and its implementing regulations. The Act also makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.
This Act strengthens the current practice of obtaining service letters for employment in child care facilities to protect children from workers who have engaged in prior acts that are prohibited by the Office of Child Care Licensing. The Act does all of the following: 1. Requires service letters used for child care facilities ask previous employers whether they would have any concerns about the employee providing care to children. 2. Requires service letters used for child care facilities ask previous employers whether the employee was ever warned, reprimanded, suspended, or discharged for any violations found in the Department of Education's Regulations for Early Care and Education and School-Age Centers. 3. Requires the Office of Child Care Licensing to report any suspected failure of an employer to adhere to the requirements of a service letter to the Department of Labor for review and possible civil penalties. 4. Clarifies the Department of Labor is the only party that can seek civil enforcement under this section. 5. Makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.
This Act adopts the Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act of 2023 (UHCDA 2023) to supersede the Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act of 1993, which Delaware enacted in 1996. The UHCDA 2023 was authored by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) and was developed in a multiyear collaborative and non-partisan process to modernize and expand on the 1993 version of the act. The UHCDA 2023 maintains processes to address how health-care decisions can be made by or on behalf of individuals who lack capacity, including: (1) Allowing individuals to appoint agents to make health-care decisions for them should they become unable to make those decisions for themselves. (2) Allowing individuals to provide their health-care professionals and agents with instructions about their values and priorities regarding their health care and to indicate medical treatment they do or do not wish to receive. (3) Authorizing certain people to make health-care decisions for individuals incapable of making their own decisions, but who have not appointed agents. (4) Setting forth agent, default surrogate, and health-care professional rights and duties. The UHCDA 2023 reflects substantial changes in how health care is delivered, increases in non-traditional familial relationships and living arrangements, the proliferation of the use of electronic documents, the growing use of separate advance directives exclusively for mental health care, and other recent developments. Some updates to the Act include: (1) Removal of administrative barriers that make the creation of an advance health-care directive more difficult. (2) Addition of provisions to guide determinations of incapacity, which is important because an agent’s or default surrogate’s (surrogate’s) authority to make health-care decisions for a patient typically commences when the patient lacks capacity to make decisions. The Act modernizes the definition of capacity so that it accounts for the functional abilities of an individual and clarifies that the individual may lack capacity to make one decision but retains capacity to make other decisions. (3) Authorizing the use of advance directives exclusively for mental health care. (4) Modernizing default surrogate provisions that allow family members and certain other people close to a patient to make decisions in the event the patient lacks capacity and has not appointed a health-care agent. The new default surrogate provisions update the priority list in the 1993 Act to reflect a broader array of relationships and family structures. They also provide additional options to address disagreements among default surrogates who have equal priority. (5) Clarifying the duties and powers of surrogates. For example, to reduce the likelihood that an individual’s health-care needs will go unmet due to financial barriers, the Act authorizes a surrogate to apply for health insurance for a patient who does not have another fiduciary authorized to do so. (6) Modernizing the optional model form to be readily understandable and accessible to diverse populations. The form gives individuals the opportunity to readily share information about their values and goals for medical care. Thus, it addresses a common concern raised by health-care professionals in the context of advance planning: that instructions included in advance directives often focus exclusively on preferences for particular treatments, and do not provide health-care professionals or surrogates with the type of information about patients’ goals and values that could be used to make value-congruent decisions when novel or unexpected situations arise. The form addresses these concerns by providing options for individuals to indicate goals and values, in addition to specific treatment preferences. This Act also adopts some of the optional provisions suggested by the ULC, including that an agent or surrogate has limited ability to consent to the long-term placement of an individual in a nursing home without express authorization. Specifically, without express authorization, the agent or surrogate may not consent to the placement for more than 100 days over the individual’s contemporaneous objection unless (1) no alternative living arrangement is reasonably feasible or (2) the individual is terminally ill. The ULC suggested 100 days in recognition that the federal Medicare program covers up to 100 days of nursing home care for qualified beneficiaries. This Act does not authorize mercy killing, assisted suicide, or euthanasia. In addition to style changes throughout, this Act makes some modifications to the UHCDA 2023 that are consistent with Act and should not disrupt uniform interpretation. These modifications include: (1) Revising language to conform to Delaware court practices. (2) Providing surrogates with the authority to file insurance or benefit claims on behalf of the individual and to appeal such outcomes, in addition to the UHCDA 2023 allowance for a surrogate to apply for insurance or benefits on behalf of the individual. As under the UHCDA 2023, a surrogate does not have the duty to perform these actions and may only do so if no other fiduciary is authorized to do so. (3) Creating an additional disqualification that disallows a potential surrogate from serving if the individual has a pending Protection From Abuse petition against the potential surrogate, the individual has a Protection From Abuse order against the potential surrogate, or the potential surrogate is the subject of a civil or criminal order prohibiting or limiting contact with the individual. Section 2 of this Act adds a new Chapter 25B to the Delaware Code. Chapter 25B will contain Delaware-specific supplements to the UHCDA 2023. These Delaware-specific additions are being placed within their own chapter to promote uniform interpretation of the UHCDA 2023. Chapter 25B includes § 2502B, which relates to health-care institution authorization to petition for guardianship for an individual to whom the institution is providing care. Section 2502B reinforces the work of the Non-Acute Medical Guardianship Task Force, created by Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 30 by the 150th General Assembly. That task force’s work resulted in the current § 2519 of Title 16, which offers a process and timeline whereby health-care institutions can take steps to help obtain a guardianship for patients who no longer require acute care and can be transferred to another type of health-care setting. While § 2502B retains the ability for a health-care institution to address the discharge of long-term stay patients without an authorized decisionmaker, it modifies the powers in the current § 2519 by doing all of the following: (1) Allowing health-care institutions to petition of the appointment of a guardian in instances beyond where an individual no longer needs acute care. (2) Reiterating that the health-care institution may only petition if they believe there is no less restrictive alternative that will meet the individual’s needs. (3) Streamlining notice requirements and changing who must receive these notices so that a health-care institution does not send a notice if there is a reasonably available surrogate. If there is a reasonably available surrogate and there is a dispute between the surrogate and the health-care institution about the treatment or level of care needed by an individual, then the parties should seek judicial relief under § 2526 of the UHCDA 2023 as opposed to using the guardianship process. The new Chapter 25B also contains a provision to encourage public awareness and use of advance mental health-care directives. Sections 3 through 11 of this Act update the Delaware Code in light of the adoption of the UHCDA 2023 by updating internal citations, updating terms to match the terms used in the UHCDA 2023, and ensuring a consistent list of default surrogate decisionmakers. This Act is effective immediately and is to be implemented 1 year from the date of enactment.
This Act adopts the Uniform Special Deposits Act (“the Act”) authored by the Uniform Law Commission. The Uniform Law Commission “provides states with non-partisan, well-conceived and well-drafted legislation that brings clarity and stability to critical areas of state statutory law.” The Act was adopted by the Uniform Law Commission in October 2023 and has been adopted in 2 states and introduced in 3 other states. The Act addresses deposits at a bank where the identity of the person entitled to payment is not determined until the occurrence of a contingency identified at the time that the deposit is created. An example of such an account is an escrow account holding funds that will be paid to one of two potential beneficiaries depending on the outcome of a contingency. Although such accounts are commonly used, the legal protections afforded them are uncertain. The fundamental purpose of the Uniform Special Deposits Act is to provide a vehicle that banks and their customers can elect to use providing greater legal certainty that the expectations of users will be respected. The Act provides a mechanism those that elect to be covered by the Act can use to avoid case law applied to special deposits that is murky and in some ways outdated in the context of modern banking. In determining whether a person is engaged in the business of banking to be considered a bank for purposes of the Act, the business of banking is intended to be construed broadly to include persons that may engage in limited functions that are part of or incidental to the business of banking, such as a trust company that engages in fiduciary and agency activities and has the power and authority to accept a special deposit. This Act takes effect on January 1, 2025.
This substitute bill for Senate Bill No. 307 clarifies the meaning of custom fabrication as first defined in Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill No. 102 in the 152nd General Assembly. That substitute bill modified the relationship between custom fabrication and the prevailing wage. This substitute removes custom fabrication as a term in Title 19 to avoid confusion of the term being defined differently in two different titles. Section 3 of this substitute bill becomes effective immediately. Sections 1, 2 and 4 of this substitute bill become effective January 1, 2025.
This Act streamlines and modernizes the State Early Childhood Education Program in § 3001 of Title 14, also referred to as State-funded early care and education, as follows: (1) Adds definitions. (2) Provides the Department of Education (Department) with a general grant of authority to provide early childhood educational services. (3) Subject to available appropriations, § 3001(c) of this Act requires the Department to provide free, full-day early childhood educational services for preschool-age children who satisfy eligibility requirements developed by the Department. This provision incorporates elements of epilogue language from the FY 2024 Annual Appropriation Act regarding the Redding Consortium and the Early Childhood Assistance Program (ECAP). (4) Allows for common standards and processes across programs. (5) Requires the early childhood educational services under § 3001(c) to align with quality standards in the categories of learning environment and curriculum, qualifications and professional development, family and community partnerships, and management and administration. (6) Aligns the length of contracts with the Head Start program, while clarifying that contracts under this section must comply with State procurement standards under Chapter 69 of Title 29. (7) Updates the Code to reflect that the Department uses a quality improvement system instead of Delaware Stars for Early Success. This Act also makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual and for clarity.
Under Title 29, Section 5805, no state employee, no state officer, and no private enterprise in which a state employee or state officer has a legal or equitable ownership of more than 10% (more than 1% in the case of a corporation whose stock is regularly traded on an established securities market) shall enter into any contract with the State (other than an employment contract) unless such contract was made or let after public notice and competitive bidding. However, the notice and bidding requirements do not apply to contracts involving $2,000 per year or less, provided that the terms of such contract reflect arms’ length negotiations. The exemption for contracts involving $2,000 per year or less went into effect in 1991 and has not been raised since. This act raises the exemption from $2,000 to $5,000 to take into account the effects of inflation. This act also deletes language in Section 5805(c) that is out-of-date.
This Act amends the Delaware Antitrust Act (“DAA”) (Chapter 21, Title 6 of the Code) to provide indirect purchasers who have been harmed by violations of the Delaware Antitrust Act the ability to sue for damages. Indirect purchasers of a product or service in the chain of distribution are often the ones who bear the burden of any overcharges from antitrust violations such as price-fixing. Direct purchasers and others in the chain of distribution of the affected product or service often have the ability to pass the overcharge through the chain of distribution to end users. This will align Delaware with at least 36 other states which currently allow for a cause of action for damages for indirect purchasers. Often, end users who make purchases in Delaware, primarily Delaware residents and businesses, are excluded from making claims against multimillion dollar settlement funds set up to compensate indirect purchasers for transactions made in other states that do authorize lawsuits for damages for indirect purchasers. To avoid complicated proof issues related to the pass through of any overcharge through the chain of distribution of a product or service, the Act creates a presumption that any overcharge paid by the first purchaser as a result of a violation of the DAA is passed through to the end user. Also, to simplify issues of proof, the Act provides a plaintiff may elect 25% of the consideration paid for the goods or services in connection with the transaction affected by an illegal restraint of trade as an alternative liquidated damage amount to actual harm. To allow Delaware consumers and businesses to fully take advantage of the remedies provided by this Act, the Act creates a private right of action. Delaware is one of only 2 states that do not provide for a private right of action under their state antitrust law of general applicability. Currently, only the Attorney General has a right to bring actions under the DAA and the Attorney General does not have the resources to review or participate in every national antitrust action. This will ensure Delaware indirect purchasers receive the benefits of private enforcement of the DAA. Section 2 of the Act creates a Delaware state law equivalent to Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal antitrust statute, which establishes three offenses commonly termed “monopolization,” “attempted monopolization,” and “conspiracy to monopolize.” Delaware is only 1 of 9 states that does not have a state law equivalent to Section 2 of the Sherman Act and its addition to the DAA is needed to ensure the remedies under the DAA including a right of recovery for indirect purchasers are available to the Attorney General and to Delaware consumers and businesses. Section 3 of the Act modifies the confidentiality restrictions of materials produced to the Attorney General pursuant to an investigative demand. It would allow for the materials to be shared with the Attorney General’s agents such as consultants, experts, electronic discovery platform vendors and economists which would be necessary for the Attorney General to decide on whether the law has been violated and how best to remedy the violation. The Act would also allow the Attorney General to share materials produced pursuant to an investigative demand with federal or state law enforcement officers that agree to keep the information confidential and use it only for official law enforcement purposes. Likewise, the Act requires the Attorney General to keep materials provided by other law enforcement officers received under similar process confidential. These provisions will make it easier for the Attorney General to work together with other federal and state law enforcers in enforcing state and federal antitrust laws. Section 4 of the Act provides an alternative calculation for civil penalties for violations of the Delaware Antitrust Act. Under certain facts and circumstances, the current maximum penalty for a violation of the DAA may be lower than the amount of the gain a violator may obtain by violating the DAA making any penalty a cost of doing business and an insufficient deterrent to violate the law. The alternative calculation provides for an assessment of a civil penalty of up to twice the gross gain or loss associated with the violation. This is like the alternative method for calculating federal criminal fines for the same conduct. Section 4 also authorizes a Court to award investigative costs, expert witness fees, and attorneys’ fees to the Attorney General when the Attorney General successfully brings a law enforcement action to enforce the DAA. Currently, a Court may only award attorney’s fees and expert costs to the Attorney General when the Attorney General brings an action on behalf of a public body or natural persons. Section 5 of the Act creates a right for indirect purchasers who have been harmed by violations of the DAA to sue for damages. It creates a presumption that overcharges paid by the first purchaser as a result of such violations are passed to the end user, and allows a plaintiff to seek liquidated damages in the amount of 25% of the consideration paid, as an alternative to seeking damages for actual harm incurred. Section 6 of the Act clarifies that the Court of Chancery has exclusive jurisdiction of all state court actions or proceedings under the DAA. The Act also makes several clarifications throughout the DAA to recognize it is often federal courts exercising supplemental jurisdiction deciding claims arising under the DAA.
This Act changes the requirements for continuing education for doctors related to Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias to require that doctors must only complete 2 hours of this continuing education once. Doctors who do not have direct patient interactions with adult populations over the age of 25 or do not currently practice within the State of Delaware are exempt from this requirement.
This Act is a result of the Delaware Interscholastic Association ("DIAA") Task Force. Based on the findings of the task force, this Act updates and modernizes the DIAA Board of Directors' composition. This Act also makes technical corrections that conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.
This Act amends Delaware’s laws regarding release of persons accused of crimes (Chapter 21 of Title 11 of the Delaware Code) as required in conjunction with the enactment of an amendment to § 12 of Article I of the Delaware Constitution permitting preventive detention, as proposed by Senate Bill No. 11 of the 152nd General Assembly. This Act protects both defendants’ due process rights and public safety by establishing the list of circumstances for which defendants may be detained pretrial without the opportunity for release and providing adequate due process protections for detention-eligible defendants. This Act protects public safety by permitting courts to detain a defendant who is charged with an enumerated felony offense where no condition or combination of conditions of bail will reasonably assure a defendant’s appearance in court or the safety of a witness, a victim, or the community. This Act also protects defendants’ rights by doing the following: (1) Requiring the Attorney General to establish by proof positive or presumption great that the defendant committed the detention-eligible offense and by clear and convincing evidence that no condition or combination of conditions of release will reasonably assure the defendant’s appearance at court proceedings, reasonably assure the protection of the community, victims, witnesses, or any other person, and reasonably maintain the integrity of the judicial process, such that the defendant will not obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice. (2) Ensuring detention-eligible defendants are represented by counsel at the initial detention and subsequent hearings. (3) Requiring courts to hold a full preventive detention hearing within 10 days of the defendant’s arrest where defendants have the right to testify, to present evidence, and to cross-examine witnesses against them. (4) Requiring expedited review of the detention order by Superior Court. (5) Providing speedy trial protections for any defendant who is detained before adjudication due to preventive detention. This Act also does the following: (1) Improves procedural fairness by permitting courts to make transparent decisions about who to detain and who to release pretrial. (2) Strengthens the strong presumption of pretrial release under least restrictive conditions for those defendants who can safely be released in the community. This Act requires a greater than majority vote for passage because this Act is enabling legislation to an amendment to the Constitution which, when enacted, amends § 12 of Article I of the Delaware Constitution to require an affirmative vote of two-thirds of the members elected to each house of the General Assembly to create the list of detention-eligible offenses created by § 2116(b)(1) of Title 11 contained in this Act. Finally, this Act makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.
House Bill No. 168 creates a short-term rental lodging tax at the rate of 8% of the rent upon every occupancy of a short-term rental within the State. For purposes of collecting the lodging tax on short-term rentals, HB 168 creates an occupational license for a short-term rental listing service. It also authorizes New Castle and Sussex Counties to impose a lodging tax of no more than 3 percent on short-term rentals. House Substitute 2 to House Bill No. 168 is primarily different from House Bill No. 168 in that it decreases the tax rate on short-term rentals and uses different terms and definitions to identify the individuals responsible for collecting short-term rental taxes. Specifically, House Substitute 2 to House Bill No. 168 makes the following changes: (1) Requires accommodations intermediaries to obtain an occupational license and pay an annual licensing fee of $25.00; (2) Ensures that accommodations intermediaries are responsible for the collection and remittance of taxes under this Act and clarifies responsibilities for the collection and remittance of the tax; (3) Defines an accommodations intermediary; (4) Decreases the short-term rental tax rate from 8% to 4.5%; (5) Establishes the short-term rental tax in a new chapter within Title 30; (6) Clarifies that short-term rental taxes will be distributed as follows: 62.5% to the State General Fund; 12.5% to the Beach Preservation Fund of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control; 12.5% to be designated in the proportion in which collected, to the duly established convention and visitors bureau in each county; and 12.5% to the Delaware Tourism Office; (7) Adds the Georgetown, Millsboro, Milton, Milford, and Western Sussex Chambers of Commerce to those organizations that determine the Sussex County Convention & Visitors Bureau; and (8) Updates effective dates for licensing, tax levy, and related obligations.
