WANTED: Maryland attorneys who own horses
An Equiery Plea to Maryland Attorneys Who Own Horses
More lawyers who happen to be horse people to join the Maryland State Bar Association’s Animal Law Section and/or at attend the 4thAnnual MSBA Animal Law Symposium.
As many regular readers of The Equiery are aware, there is a fundamental philosophical difference between advocates for animal rights and advocates for animal welfare.
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H-2B Visa Application Process Temporarily Suspended
From the American Horse Council, 4/8/13
On April 2, 2013, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it has temporarily suspended processing most petitions for new H-2B temporary non-agricultural workers. This announcement was in response to a court decision issuing a permanent injunction against certain parts of the current Department of Labor (DOL) rule governing H-2B program wage rates.
This will effectively prevent most H-2B employers, including those in the horse industry, from hiring any new H-2B workers for at least 30 days. H-2B workers currently in the country will not be impacted.
On March 21, 2013, a judge in Pennsylvania granted a permanent injunction against the 2008 H-2B wage rule that is currently used to issue “prevailing wage determinations” and gave DOL 30 days to come into compliance with the Court order. H-2B employers must receive a “prevailing wage determination” as part of the process to bring an H-2B worker into the county. The DOL will continue to process some prevailing wage requests not subject to the court order, such as those based on Collective Bargaining Agreements, acceptable private wage surveys, the Service Contract Act or the Davis Bacon act.
DOL has said they plan to issue a new emergency wage rule within 30 days.
The AHC and other H-2B user groups are looking at all options to ensure the H-2B program resumes processing new applications as soon as possible.
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NEW! Maryland Thoroughbred Hall of Fame
The Thoroughbred horse is the official Maryland state breed of horse, and now we will have an official Hall of Fame for our state breed. Yesterday, April 2, 2013, the Maryland Horse Breeders Association (MHBA) and Maryland Racing Media Association (MRMA) announced the 12-horse inaugural class and operational details of their newly established joint venture, the Maryland-bred Thoroughbred Hall of Fame (MTHOF).
Flat runners Broad Brush, Challedon, Cigar, Find, Gallorette, Jameela, Politely, Safely Kept, Twixt and Vertex and steeplechasers Elkridge and Jay Trump earned induction into the MTHOF. The honorees, with biographies, photos, videos and complete race records, will be showcased on-line at www.mdthoroughbredhalloffame.com while plans to establish a physical facility continue.
“It is virtual for now but, as we move forward with a horse industry museum here, we will make sure that the great Maryland-bred horses will have a place of honor,” said MHBA executive director Cricket Goodall. “It is important that their achievements be marked for all time.”
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Gas Taxes, Sunday Hunting & More
UPDATE 4:16 p.m. Friday, March 29, 2013: Today, the gas tax bill (HB 1515) cleared the Maryland General Assembly and will now go before the Governor. To find out who voted and how they voted, click here.
Original Post: Maryland horse people may be “farm bodies,” but –-as an industry–-we are road warriors. We are hauling horses, hauling feed, hauling hay. Vets and farriers and other service providers live their lives on the road. And we are not hauling all of this tonnage with hybrids. So any change in the Maryland gas tax will hit our industry, and hit it hard.
HB 1515 will increase the fuel taxes we pay. The bill does not specifically state what the new tax on fuel would be; rather, the bill lays out a rather complex mathematical formula (tied into evaluations of the consumer price index and average retail prices of fuel) for increasing the gas tax. Some websites calculate that the gas tax in Maryland, which today is 23.5¢ a gallon, could rise to as much as 38.2¢ per gallon by the end of 2015, and would effectively raise the gas tax by as much as 63% and the diesel tax by as much as 82% by 2015, but other sources say that the formula would increase the gas tax by approximately 6%. The Equiery has not verified whether or not these calculations fit in with the mathematical formula as outlined in the bill, as our accountant is rather busy this time of the year. However, we will provide you with links (see below) to other sources.
The bill also contains language that would prohibit governors from raiding the Transportation Trust Fund in the future (as has happened in the past). The bill also details funding for bike lanes, watershed implementation plans, Maryland Emergency Medical System (and its communication systems), Shock Trauma, base salaries for pilots and technicians and field instructors, the Sen. William Amoss Fire, Rescue & Ambulance Fund, and other projects.
HB 1515 was introduced on March 4, and in the fast and furious times that define the last five week of the Maryland General Assembly, it looks like it has been amended about 12 times before being passed by the House Ways and Means Committee on March 20, and then by the House of Delegates on March 22. The bill crossed over to the Senate, where it was heard in the Budget & Taxation Committee on Monday, March 25. Today, March 29, it received a favorable report by Budget & Taxation and will now go before the full body.
For more information:
UPDATE: Sunday Hunting – There is still time!
The Queen Anne bill (SB 24) is scheduled for a hearing in the House Environmental Matters Committee on Wed. April 3 at 1 p.m.
The Carroll County bill (HB 543) was supposed to have been heard on Tuesday in the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee…and it has not yet come out of committee, according to the official website.
UPDATE Spay/Neuter Bill
The Senate version of the spay/neuter bill, SB 820, which crossed over to the House at the top of the week, has received a favorable report from the House Environmental Matters Committee and will now go before the entire body for a vote. This “favorable” designation by the House Environmental Matters Committee is dated April 1.
Spay/Neuter Fund
Many Maryland foxhunters recently received, as an ostensibly “friendly FYI,” an email regarding a piece of Maryland legislation colloquially known as the “spay/neuter fund bill.”
Much of the information contained in this forwarded email about the spay/neuter fund bill is speculative–not fact. It was forwarded to Maryland foxhunters in the hopes of goading Maryland foxhunters to do something about the bill…but we at The Equiery want our readers and our Maryland foxhunters to be armed with the facts, not speculation and innuendo, before kicking into action.
As we reported earlier on equiery.com and in the March print edition of The Equiery, Maryland HB 767 & SB 82 would establish a Spay/Neuter Fund for cats and dogs. The lobbying organization for Maryland foxhunters (MAWC) has been monitoring this bill. The Maryland Horse Council has been active on this bill to help amend some of the language regarding the funding mechanism (originally, the bill required a fee be attached to all animal feed sold in Maryland, and MHC and other organizations requested–and received–amendments clarifying that said fee be attached only to dog and cat food).
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Expanded Sunday Hunting in Carroll & Queen Anne’s could happen
Yesterday was a frantic day for the Maryland General Assembly – and not because it was a snow day, and not because it was Holy Monday – although it is a legislative high holy day, for sure. Yesterday was “Crossover Day:” any bills the either the House or the Senate intend to pass must to be voted “out” of their respective chambers by the end of the day so that those bills can then “crossover” to the other chamber. Bills that do not crossover are considered dead for this year (not that there have not been miraculous resurrections before, after all, ‘tis the season for them, but the general rule is that crossover day is final).
Once a bill has crossed over to the other chamber, it must be approved by said chamber before it can go to the Governor to be signed into law. Of course, at that point, the Governor can exercise his veto power by refusing to sign a bill into law.
Carroll & Queen Anne’s Sunday Hunting Bills Have Crossed Over
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Racing Commission amends Claiming Rules in response to fatal breakdowns
Analysis by Andrew Beyer in The Racing Form.
by The Blood-Horse’s John Scheinman; reposted here with permission.
Seeking to address a rash of fatal breakdowns during the Laurel Park winter meet, the Maryland Racing Commission March 20 revised new claiming rules passed in February.
A three-member commission Safety and Welfare/Medication Committee was unable to pin down the cause of the breakdowns–10 horses in a span of 23 racing days,
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Maryland should preserve the Contributory Negligence Liability Standard in Lawsuits
The Maryland horse industry, indeed, the Maryland business community as a whole, works hard to maintain Maryland’s standards of liability, which are supportive of landowner and business owners in the face of frivolous liability lawsuits.
(For an excellent primer on Maryland’s liability and negligence standards, and how they affect the horse industry, please click here to visit The Equiery archives; click here to see a position analysis by the Maryland Horse Council.)
Maryland’s contributory negligence standards are not codified in law, and thus could be overturned by a court decision. So the Maryland Horse Council, along with the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, are supporting two bills that would codify Maryland’s current contributory negligence liability standard, ensuring that the contributing fault of an injured party can be asserted as a defense in a lawsuit. The law would only go into effect in the event that
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Mid-Atlantic and Northeast States Commit to Uniform Medication and Drug Testing Program for Flat Racing
Breaking news from the Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred and the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association:
In a bold move towards the uniform regulation of medication and drug testing in North American racing, the regulators of eight states in the Mid Atlantic and Northeast have committed to implement a uniform medication and drug testing program. The agreement, spearheaded by the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (THA), represents the most dramatic change in medication regulation and testing in the last 50 years and could pave the way for national uniformity.
The participating states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Massachusetts—will implement the Mid Atlantic Uniform Medication Program. The Program divides medications into two new categories—Controlled Therapeutic Substances and Prohibited Substances. The Controlled Therapeutic Substances category will limit horsemen and veterinarians to 24 medications that have been recognized as appropriate for therapeutic use in racehorses to treat illness or injury. These medications were identified following intensive consultation among the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP), the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC), the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI) and the industry’s chemists and pharmacologists. These medications will each have a specific published restricted administration time and uniform laboratory detection level which, when combined, will enable the therapeutic treatment of the horse while ensuring that no pharmacologically significant residue of the medication will be present in the horse during a race. The presence of these and any other medication or drug in a sample collected from a horse will be strictly prohibited.
The Controlled Therapeutic Substances are click here to read the rest of the article…
Bowie should be preserved as part of Maryland’s horse heritage
submitted by Valerie Orm0nd
The city of Bowie may soon be acquiring the 100-acre property known as the Bowie Race Course Training Center. Due to the recent 10-year agreement between the Maryland Racing Commission and the Maryland Jockey Club, the Bowie training facility will most likely close for good
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