The First Session of the 99th General Assembly will end on Friday at 6 p.m. This session has seen a number of victories and upsets as far as passed legislation and proposals that never made it to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.
Senate Bill 66 is one of the victories. Recent court decisions have opened up employers to greater liability and lowered the standard to make a claim for discrimination. The rulings have also threatened to diminish Missouri’s workers’ compensation system, which is designed to ensure resources are available when a person who has sustained on-the-job injuries needs time to recover before returning to work.
This legislation protects the current workers’ compensation system and adds much-needed reforms by carefully balancing the need for protections for injured workers and the need to keep the state’s business community and job creation efforts intact.
This bill restores the standard of proof in workers’ compensation discrimination cases. This bill also contains a provision that modifies the definition of “maximum medical improvement” to the point at which the injured employee’s medical condition can no longer reasonably improve as determined by the employer’s physician. Temporary total and temporary partial disability benefits will only continue until the employee reaches maximum medical improvement and are not payable if the employee returns to work. Benefits will not exceed 400 weeks.
The passage of Senate Bill 66 is one of the victories we should celebrate this legislative session. We need to ensure that injured workers are protected, but we also need to make sure we haven’t caused harm to the state’s business community.
I was pleased to see Senate Bill 64 pass this week. This legislation renames a Franklin County bridge on Highway 100 across Big Boeuf Creek as the Lyndon Ebker Memorial Bridge. Mr. Ebker, a 30-year veteran with the Missouri Department of Transportation, was struck and killed by a motorist as he inspected the bridge near New Haven.
As of this writing, I still have several important bills pending in the House of Representatives including the Blue Alert Bill (House Bill 302) and a large transportation bill, Senate Bill 225, which my committee put together. I will have more information on the fate of these bills and how session went in next week’s column.
Thank you for reading this weekly column. Please contact my office at (573) 751-3678 if you have any questions.