Legislators consider adding ‘necessity’ and ‘reasonableness’ tests to void administrative rules

Representative Ben Koppelman introduced House Bill 1368 to the State and Local Government Committee and described it as an effort to “protect the administrative rules process by ensuring that rules follow legislative intent as well as hold rule making to a standard of reasonable and necessary.”

Koppelman said the bill would add two explicit standards—an absence of necessity and an absence of reasonableness—to the current statutory list of reasons the Administrative Rules Committee can void or avoid a rule. “So really the sum total of this bill that's new is do we believe that the administrative rules committee should be allowed to use, terms like necessary and reasonable as tests,” he told the committee.

The representative and other proponents framed the proposal as a clarification and safeguard: because adopted administrative rules carry the “weight of law,”…