Nebraska

2024 Nebraska Legislative Updates

• Nebraska Primary Election

  The Nebraska Primary Election is coming up, so make your voices heard! When carpenters vote, politicians listen.

  • Primary Election: May 14, 2024
  • Early Voting Begins: April 15, 2024

  Find your voting location by visiting https://www.votercheck.necvr.ne.gov/voterview.

  Nebraskans are now required to show a form of ID to vote. For a list of acceptable forms of photo ID, visit https://sos.nebraska.gov/elections/voter-id.

• Budget

  The long-awaited revenue package of component parts via LB 388 advanced from the Revenue Committee and is designed to reduce reliance on property taxes. The property tax plan is Governor Pillen’s priority this session and it looks like the tax increases, tax shifts and getting rid of a handful of exemptions will get to roughly $650 million which is significantly less than the Governor’s $1 billion goal. The Governor signed the budget bills without any line-item vetoes.

• Unemployment Insurance Cards

  The Carpenters effort to kill LB1170 that cut unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 16 weeks was successful. Senator Merv Riepe’s priority bill died after its initial senate floor debate and after Nebraska members held several one-on-one conversations with legislators during our legislative conference in early March. Thank you to all the members that participated in the conference. Your union activism focused on carpenter economics killed a terrible piece of legislation. Speaker Arch kept his word that the bill would not see the senate floor again.

• Unfinished Business

  Our bill LB 540 from last session, which amends the Public Letting Statue, was stalled again. We have researched, drafted and secured a commitment from Senator Tony Vargas to continue to move our bill to General File. The bill strategically seeks to ensure that contractors and subcontractors employed on public sector projects more than $500,000 provide proof of workers compensation coverage, a list of subcontractors and provide either direct deposit or check payment with deductions for all trade workers employed. A due process procedure is set to enforce penalties for non-compliance. Unfortunately, our bill did not move out of the Business and Labor committee. We will have to pursue it again next session.

• Nebraska Legislative Conference

  The 2024 Nebraska Legislative Conference took place March 5-6. The conference was a great success. Members represented carpenters values with their legislators and heard from guest speakers including Javier Saldana from the Nebraska Department of Economic Development and Jake Rodiek from Nebraska Game and Parks.