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Meeting Water Affordability Challenges in the Era of the Unexpected
Get PDFThe vast majority of Americans depend on a public water supply for the procurement and delivery of their water. Water providers are tasked with securing water supplies for the future, building and maintaining the infrastructure needed for delivery, and ensuring service is available for new customers. This system has worked for many decades in part because the costs of water and construction were relatively low; however, in the past twenty years, water rates have increased at twice the rate of inflation. At the same time, income has remained stagnant. Water services now require a larger percentage of household budgets than ever before.
Cities face a heightened challenge because current water supplies are often not sufficient for projected growth. Unpredicted events, such as a global pandemic or extreme weather events, worsen the problem. Further, the majority of the nation’s water infrastructure requires extensive upgrades due to years of delayed maintenance. The majority of these costs will come from collected revenues. As affordability becomes a growing concern, utilities have created Customer Assistance Programs to help users can manage their bills, but implementation faces many challenges. Costs can add up quickly, the current cost of service model can constrain how such programs are funded, and a utility must determine who qualifies for these programs.
Because water is an essential need, solutions must be found to meet the needs of water customers. This Paper considers how affordability programming should be developed to ensure people can maintain access to this critical resource and proposes alternatives to assist users while effectively managing utility budgets. Utilities need to adopt a variety of assistance programs that are both preventive and responsive to customer expenses and legal changes to cost of service limitations are needed to allow cross subsidization of customer classes and assist the utilities’ resilience and revenue stability
A New Age of Antitrust: How the Latest FTC Leadership is Rewriting the Rules
Get PDFThe addition of a new Chair of the United States Federal Trade Commission has brought major changes relating to Big Tech. In this article, Sara Rutherford discusses the FTC\u27s new anti-trust policies and their application to big companies.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1102/thumbnail.jp
The Functional Operation of Workers’ Compensation COVID Presumptions
Get PDFDuring 2020, a number of U.S. states implemented workers\u27 compensation COVID-19 presumptions. This short informal paper defines and explains legal presumptions generally and then discusses the workers\u27 compensation presumptions. The paper contends that at this juncture it is not clear whether states intended to enact Thayer-Wigmore or Morgan presumptions; but if they operate as Thayer-Wigmore presumptions they will not do workers\u27 compensation claimants much good in the context of non-jury proceedings presided over by administrative law judges
Challenges for Black Workers After 2020: Antiracism in the Gig Economy?
Get PDFBlack workers’ fortunes in the coming decades are tied to the expansion of the Gig economy, the impact of which is to destroy employee status. Because much antiracism law and policy has been transmitted to society through the medium of employment law, the disappearance of employee status should be of concern to all foes of racism. This short essay argues that Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 should be expanded to cover all forms of racist workplace conduct. Regulatory arbitrage will continue to challenge the definition of employment for the foreseeable future. It is fitting that one of the great antiracist laws in the history of the United States be modified to cut through the haze, ensuring that Black workers have remedies for racist workplace conduct, however the workplace may be fortuitously or strategically defined, now or in the future. Acceptable, but not quite as good, alternatives to expanding Section 1981 are to explicitly cover independent contractors with existing antiracist employment law (such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964); or to embrace the “ABC” employment test, which makes it much more difficult for employers to inappropriately classify employees (entitled to the protections of antiracist and other employment laws) as independent contractors (who are not entitled to those protections)
Censorship is so Last Century: Therapeutic Products, Propaganda, and Compelled Speech
Get PDFIn 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, striking down a California law mandating that clinics for low-income pregnant women disclose, among other things, the availability of publicly-funded abortion services at other facilities. Although frequently maligned for allowing crisis pregnancy centers to mislead their clients, the decision gave private parties a powerful new tool for resisting government demands to carry unwanted messages: only genuinely “uncontroversial” disclaimer requirements pass muster, and only to the extent necessary to guard against potentially misleading claims. If applied in an even-handed fashion, then courts should just as readily invalidate laws recently adopted in almost a dozen states (and sponsored by pro-life groups) that obligate suppliers of the abortifacient mifepristone to incorrectly advise patients that they could reverse the procedure even after starting use of the drug. More straightforward state and federal disclosure requirements may, however, also fare poorly. Under the cover of an abortion-related dispute, Justice Thomas finally appears to have succeeded in his long-running campaign to collapse the distinction between core and commercial speech
Death is Certain but Probate is Optional: How to Transfer Wealth and Dodge Creditors Using a Revocable Trust
Get PDFThis article explores the impact on creditors of two common methods of wealth transfer at death in the state of Missouri: the revocable inter vivos trust and the traditional probate estate administration process. In the former, the trustee will administer the property in the trust in accordance with its terms, thus circumventing the probate process for the assets placed in the trust. In the latter, a personal representative is appointed to manage the decedent’s final affairs through the probate courts in accordance with probate rules. The trustee and the personal representative play very similar roles but are held to different standards when it comes to their responsibility under the law. Each will step into the shoes of the decedent when it comes to managing affairs, but only of them can be held personally liable for mismanagement with respect to the decedent’s creditors.
A personal representative is charged with payment of the decedent’s debts before distributing any remaining assets to beneficiaries, but the trustee has no such duty. Nor will the trustee of a revocable trust be held liable for not doing so. The statutory remedy is instead to chase after the trust beneficiaries individually for their pro rata share of the debt rather than have debts paid prior to distribution; an outcome that can prove to be fruitless in many cases due to the cost of litigation if the beneficiaries choose not to pay. The law is clear that during the lifetime of the settlor, the property of a revocable trust is subject to claims of the settlor\u27s creditors, which includes claims existing at death. Heirs are simply not entitled to any assets until the indebtedness of the decedent is discharged by proper management of the estate. The law as to creditors\u27 rights needs to be revisited and carefully harmonized to clearly define rights and procedures in all assets at death to avoid such inconsistent results
Why are Over 98% of the Applications for Debt Discharge Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program Being Denied?
Get PDFOn October 1, 2017, student loan borrowers who had taken out federal Direct Loans first became eligible for debt forgiveness under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program after completing the required ten years of qualified public service employment. But as of March 31, 2020, over ninety-eight percent of the more than 188,000 applications for debt relief that had been filed and fully processed under this program have been denied. The later-adopted Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness program also has a strikingly high ninety-four percent plus denial rate for the over 29,000 applications for debt relief filed and processed as of that date.
This short Article considers the possible reasons for these bizarrely high denial rates and concludes that they are due in large part, though not entirely, to inadequate borrower outreach and assistance efforts by the Department of Education and its several loan servicers. Over the coming years, the proportion of debt relief applications approved under these programs will likely increase, hopefully rather dramatically. This is likely to happen because: (1) each year a somewhat larger proportion of outstanding federal student loans will be the Direct Loans that are eligible for discharge under these programs, rather than ineligible loans taken out under the earlier, and now-discontinued, Federal Family Education Loan program; (2) borrowers will surely become more aware over time of both the large benefits and specific requirements of these programs as they are more extensively publicized in the media; and (3) under the Biden Administration the Department of Education will almost certainly make more effective efforts to assist eligible borrowers to obtain debt forgiveness
The Effects of Missouri\u27s Medicaid Expansion
Get PDFA Missouri Supreme Court ordered the Missouri legislature to implement a state constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid. In this article, Chandni Challa argues that this decision will undoubtedly affect the state economy, and based on empirical evidence from Michigan, provide a net benefit.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1075/thumbnail.jp
