Op-Ed: Insight into the World of Legislative Frustration
Insight into the World of Legislative Frustration:
A prime example of why I vote NO on bills that sound on first blush like good ideas.
By State Representative Doug Dubitsky
Last week, House Bill 5729, An Act Making Minor Revisions to Provisions of the General Statutes Concerning Kennel Service Advertisements, was called for a vote in the Connecticut House of Representatives. The original bill was meant to prevent people from advertising kennel services without a state-issued license to operate a kennel.
As the bill was being introduced, the legislator introducing it proposed a “strike all” amendment. That means everything in the original bill – except the title – is stricken, and something completely different is substituted in its place. The new bill had nothing whatsoever to do with advertising kennel services, but instead, imposed a new requirement that anyone maintaining a commercial kennel or providing commercial kennel services must be licensed by the state. That made this bill, under its original name, a very different bill intended to change a very different law. Members of the House were given only minutes to review and analyze this completely new and different bill.
While hurriedly reading the new language, I discovered that it now required a license to “offer the services of a “commercial kennel” as defined in section 22-327 . . . .”
In order to figure out what someone needs a license to do under this bill, I looked at how Connecticut General Statutes § 22-327 defines “services of a commercial kennel.” Unfortunately, Section 22-327 contains no such definition. It does however, define “commercial kennel” as “a kennel maintained for boarding or grooming dogs or cats, and includes, but is not limited to, any veterinary hospital which boards or grooms dogs or cats for nonmedical purposes.” OK, I thought, so a “commercial kennel” is “a kennel maintained for boarding or grooming dogs or cats.” It’s a facility of some sort, a place, perhaps a building.
But then I looked at the definition of “kennel” under that same statute and found that it is not a facility, place or building at all. Instead, a “kennel” is defined as “one pack or collection of dogs which are kept under one ownership at a single location and are bred for show, sport or sale.” So a “kennel” is a pack of breeding dogs, but a “commercial kennel” (which incorporates the term “kennel”) is a facility where dogs and cats are boarded and groomed. How can a facility for boarding and grooming dogs and cats be a pack of dogs bred for show, sport or sale? The English language cannot be twisted to reconcile these two definitions.
But this new bill was seeking to prohibit anyone from offering “the services of a commercial kennel” without first obtaining a license. Is there anyone that can tell me exactly what “services of a commercial kennel” means under these conflicting statutory definitions? What exactly will this new license allow people to do? How is anyone supposed to know what this new bill requires of them?
Realizing that the substitute bill would mandate a license to provide completely unidentifiable services, I rose and addressed the problem to the full House of Representatives. But instead of welcoming my comments, many in the chamber flashed me “don’t bother us with the facts” stares. Despite being incomprehensible in practice, the bill passed 140 in favor and 4 (including me) opposed.
So if you see that some of my votes are contrary to the votes of other Representatives, or if it looks like I am an outlier on what sounds from its title like a perfectly reasonable bill, just remember An Act Making Minor Revisions to Provisions of the General Statutes Concerning Kennel Service Advertisements – a bill that had nothing to do with kennel service advertisements, but rather imposed new licensing mandates for services that cannot be deciphered from the statutes.