Sen. Jack Walsh

This Act closes a loophole in the prevailing wage statute that was being used to pay workers below the prevailing wage by performing work offsite instead of onsite, regardless of whether it was necessary to do so. This bill also makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.

This is a housekeeping bill to remove outdated references to the term “coroner” in the Delaware Code. Created in 1682, the Office of the Coroner was one of the earliest elective offices in Delaware. The primary responsibility of the coroner was to investigate all cases in which a person died while in prison, was killed, died an unnatural death, or the circumstances of the death were unknown. It was also the duty of the coroner to arrest a person believed to have committed murder or manslaughter and to perform the duties of the sheriff when the sheriff was unavailable. The Office of the Coroner was abolished in 1969 and the responsibility for determining the cause of death is now the responsibility of the Medical Examiner. Today, it is outside the Medical Examiner’s scope of employment to perform many of the job duties that coroners were historically expected to do, and this bill clarifies that Medical Examiners are only responsible for investigating causes of death throughout the State under the provisions of Chapter 47 of Title 29, relating to forensic science.

This Act will continue for calendar year 2024 the temporary relief provided in calendar year 2023 to employers who pay unemployment tax assessments. It will continue to reduce new employer tax rates, hold constant overall employer tax rates from last calendar year, and reduce the maximum earned rate. This Act will also continue the temporary simplification of the tax rate schedules that are used to calculate unemployment assessments paid by employers. The Governor’s agreement to use federal pandemic funds to restore the pandemic-depleted Unemployment Trust Fund made the Unemployment Trust Fund sufficiently solvent and is allowing the Department to implement unemployment tax relief measures to Delaware employers for an additional one-year period for calendar year 2024. The Department estimates that these unemployment tax assessment changes will reduce the tax obligation of employers an estimated $50 million compared to the tax rates absent the temporary relief. This Act also restructures the supplemental assessment that is currently collected from all employers, keeping it at the same rate of 0.2%, but depositing it in the Special Administration Fund instead of the UI Trust Fund. This Act expands the uses for the Special Administration Fund to include future technology needs of the Department and makes technical corrections to the administration provisions of the Special Administration Fund to align with current State Treasurer practices.

This Act is a substitute for Senate Bill No. 1. Like Senate Bill No. 1, this Act creates a right to representation for tenants in evictions and other landlord-tenant actions. The disruptive displacement that accompanies eviction proceedings creates significant costs for state and local government related to shelter funding, education funding, health care provided in hospitals instead of community-based providers, transportation costs for homeless youth, and foster care. Evictions and disruptive displacement also have significant, well-documented, and long-lasting effects on the lives of individuals and families, including poorer physical and mental health, increased risk of homelessness, increased risk of employment loss, loss of personal property, damage to credit standing, and relocation into substandard housing. Further, evictions fall disproportionately on Black and Latinx families, who have also been the hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 of this Act establishes a right to representation for evictions and other landlord-tenant actions for covered individuals with household incomes below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines. The Attorney General shall contract with legal services providers for the provision of representation in proceedings covered by this Act. The Right to Representation Coordinator will manage the contracts and work with community organizations to do outreach and education regarding the right to representation. Section 1 of this Act requires landlords to provide notice of the right to representation at periodic designated intervals in the tenancy and in eviction proceedings. Section 2 of this Act authorizes the creation of a residential eviction diversion program modeled after the Superior Court’s Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Mediation Program. Section 3 of this Act is a severability clause. Section 4 of this Act makes Sections 1 and 6 effective 120 days after the Act's enactment. Section 5 of this Act makes Section 2 of this Act contingent on funding. Section 6 requires the Coordinator to provide the General Assembly with a copy of the first annual report required under § 5605 of Title 25, as contained in this Act, to determine if additional funding is needed to address the fiscal impact of the Act on the Justice of the Peace Court. This Act differs from Senate Bill No. 1 as it does all of the following: (1) Removes a judicial or administrative proceeding to remedy a violation of law related to security deposit from the list of proceedings included in a covered proceeding. (2) Replaces “covered individual” with “tenant” in the provision determining a tenant’s eligibility to be a covered individual. (3) Makes clear that a covered individual’s household income is to be determined over the immediately preceding 12 months. (4) Makes clear how to determine household income for a full-time student. (5) Tabulates the list of notices provided by a landlord that trigger a covered individual’s receipt of legal representation and further clarifies the notice related to termination of a rental agreement. (6) Provides that a designated organization may decline representation if an attorney deems the covered individual’s defense to lack merit, in addition to a determination by the attorney that an appeal lacks merit. (7) Provides that a covered individual is entitled to receive legal representation as soon as practicable after the initiation of a covered proceeding, rather than just an eviction proceeding. (8) Removes the requirement that a court, at a covered individual’s first appearance in a covered proceeding, provide a covered individual with notice of the individual’s right to, and the availability of, legal representation under this Act. This notice is intended to be provided earlier by the Right to Representation Coordinator (“Coordinator”). (9) Requires that events planned for, and information distributed to, tenants also be made available to landlords and property managers. (10) Requires that the Coordinator include a full accounting of their expenditures as part of the required annual report. (11) Provides that the Coordinator is to prepare information explaining legal representation available to tenants, provides that the information is known as “informational materials”, requires the Coordinator to prepare the informational materials in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, and clarifies the events that require the informational materials to be provided to a tenant. (12) Clarifies the date from which actions are to be taken by the Coordinator and the Justice of the Peace Courts. (13) Makes clear that the provision of legal representation to a covered individual under Section 1 of this Act is not intended to be the sole basis for a continuance of a covered proceeding scheduled before the effective date of Section 1 of this Act for a hearing on or after the effective date of Section 1 of this Act. (14) Provides that the residential eviction diversion program includes an initial mediation conference rather than a conciliation conference. (15) Makes technical corrections, including to use the defined term “rental agreement” instead of “lease” and to insert “Delaware” before “Supreme Court” for clarity.

Delaware law expressly prohibits employment discrimination based upon surviving domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Such discrimination includes: (1) failing or refusing to hire or discharging an employee because the individual was a victim of domestic violence, sexual offense, or stalking; or (2) failing or refusing to make reasonable accommodations to the limitations known to the employer and related to domestic violence, a sexual offense, or stalking. Current statute requires the victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking to provide verification to their employer. This bill provides employers with the option to require verification in order to receive accommodations.

This Act makes updates to Title 15 related to the efficient administration of elections. Section 1 requires that ballots and sufficient materials essential for the administration for each election shall be provided to each polling location on Election Day.   Section 2 revises, consolidates, and clarifies the sections of the Code that address opening and preparing ballots for tabulation. Updates are made to the language to reflect the use of electronic scanning and tabulation machinery rather than written tally sheets. It also clarifies the process for creating a duplicate ballot that can be read by the machine in the event the original ballot is unreadable. For administrative efficiency, the Act extends the time when ballots may be opened and processed to begin 30 days before the election rather than the Friday before the election.Finally, instead of requiring the teams of election judges to be composed of half Democrats and half Republicans, the requirement would now be that no more than half of the members of the team may be registered with any one party. This allows independents or members of smaller parties to participate as election judges but prevents any one party from dominating a team, as a safeguard against fraud. The requirement that ballots may only be opened and processed in public meetings, with challengers present, and that the ballots at all times are securely stored is maintained. The results of the ballots are not permitted to be extracted or reported before the polls have closed on the day of the election

This Act allows the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control to assist more small businesses and organizations in making energy efficiency improvements to their facilities by raising the proportion of those projects that can be funded through grants or loans by the Energy Efficiency Investment Fund. Currently, assistance is capped at 30% of the project cost up to $250,000, leaving an applicant to come up with the remaining 70% or more. This can be prohibitive for smaller entities. By raising the eligible proportion of the project cost to 60%, without changing the maximum funding, the Department can help more small businesses, local governments, and nonprofits reduce their operating costs and environmental impact.

This legislation is an attempt to strike a balance between the need to protect hospital staff, hospital patients, and the public from harm during a State of Emergency, pandemic, or infectious disease outbreak with the expectation that patients should be able to receive support from their family and spiritual counselors during a time of personal crisis. This act shall be known as "The No Patient Left Alone Act." Specifically, it migrates decision-making authority on visitation policies from elected and unelected state officials to the medical personnel operating Delaware’s hospitals – the trained professionals best positioned to make these difficult decisions during an especially challenging time. While it is the intention of this act to facilitate limited in-person patient visitation, its gives hospitals and designated medical professionals broad authority and discretion to safeguard the welfare of all involved parties. Hospitals would be able to: restrict the number of visitors patients could receive daily; require visitors to undergo and pass a specified health screening; and use personal protective equipment while visiting. Hospitals would be able to specify the required personal protective equipment, making it available for visitors to purchase on-site, subject to availability. Entry could be denied to visitors that failed their health screenings; were found to have a communicable disease; were found to have been exposed to a communicable disease; or failed to sign a statement indicating that they understood the visitation policy, and held the hospital and its staff harmless for all assumed risk directly associated with the primary cause of the State of Emergency, pandemic, or infectious disease outbreak. Attending physicians and other medical professionals designated in the bill would retain the authority to deny in-person visitation if they deemed their patients would be at risk for contracting an infectious disease or if they believed visitation posed a serious community health risk. Such determinations would be valid for up to seven days and subject to renewal. Hospitals could deny visitation if a state agency regulation, federal order, federal law, or federal regulation required it. If a prospective hospital visitor were denied in-person visitation with patients, the hospital would be required, to its best efforts, to develop alternate visitation protocols that would allow visitation to the greatest extent safely possible. This could include, but not be limited to, streaming audio and video. Hospitals could not prohibit in-person visitation by a religious counselor to a seriously ill or dying patient, providing that the counselor complied with all visitation mandates established pursuant to this act. A visit by a religious counselor would not be counted against any daily visitation limit set by the hospital. The Department of Health and Social Services would be responsible for overseeing the implementation, operation, and enforcement of this act. Hospitals could be subject to fines for violating the terms of this act, providing the violations continue after the hospitals have been informed of the need to take corrective action. This measure would become effective 180 days after its enactment. This substitute bill differs from the bill it replaces in the following ways: • It eliminates the liability provisions previously contained on lines 56 through 62, and line 103, replacing it with a new liability section - 1014A (c)(3)(E) - that is more refined and requires a signed acknowledgment by the visitor of the risk they are assuming. This acknowledgement does not allow the hospital or personnel to be held harmless for intentional misconduct or gross negligence. • It adds the terms “advanced practice clinician, or chief medical officer” to the sections previously on lines 63 through 67 dealing with the healthcare professionals authorized to restrict visitation for justifiable medical or public health reasons. • Adds the term “state agency regulation” to the section previously on lines 48 through 50 that specify the reasons a hospital may be compelled to deny visitation. • Rewrites the section previously on lines 41 through 47 to improve the clarity of the list of conditions under which a hospital can deny entry to, or remove a visitor from, the hospital's premises. • Corrects language previously on lines 39 through 40 to reflect an earlier change to the bill that deals with the requirement for visitors to wear personal protective equipment, as stipulated by the hospital, when visiting a hospital patient. • Adds a new section - 1014A (i) - stipulating that other than the potential restrictions stipulated in Subsection (c) and Subsection (e) a hospital may not prohibit in-person visitation by a doula providing doula services as defined in § 6536A of Title 11 with a pregnant or postpartum person.

This Act creates certain uniform, minimum requirements for public notice related to permits and permit renewals issued by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. In particular, the notice must include instructions for electronic submission of public comment or request for hearing, the permit application to which the notice applies must be available electronically and a link to a page where the application may be accessed electronically shall be provided in the text of the notice, a copy of the notice shall be posted on the Department's website in addition to whatever other means of delivery is required for the notice, and elected officials whose district includes the location of the permitted activity must be individually notified by e-mail. Where the application materials are too voluminous to post online the Department may provide instructions for alternative access. Conforming and technical changes are made to other parts of the Code that deal directly with public notice of permit applications. The Act is effective 180 days after its enactment.

This Act corrects the Delaware crisis text number and the National Suicide Prevention call or text line that is required to be printed on pupil identification cards for all public schools serving pupils in grades 7 to 12 and for all students attending public institutions of higher learning in Delaware. This Act takes effect for the 2023-2024 school year.