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Valerie Longhurst

House Majority Leader Valerie Longhurst was first elected to the Delaware House of Representatives in 2004 as Delaware’s 15th District Representative. A mother of two, and a dedicated public servant, Longhurst is a staunch and proven advocate for the people of Delaware, fighting for common sense gun safety measures, women’s equality and reproductive rights, and expanded mental and behavioral health services in Delaware.

She was elected House Majority Whip in 2008, serving for four years until 2012, when she was elected as House Majority Leader. She currently also chairs the House Administration Ethics and Rules Committee.

Throughout the past two decades, Longhurst has sponsored multiple bills protecting and advocating for women’s rights in the workplaces, fighting for the protection of reproductive rights and paternal leave; she has sponsored many pieces of legislation focused on strengthening gun safety to ensure security for all of Delaware’s residents.

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Legislative Accomplishments

  • Limits access to firearms for those considered a danger to themselves or others.

    Instructs health professionals to report to law enforcement anyone they believe presents a danger to themselves or others. 

    It adds the following individuals to the list of persons prohibited from owning a firearm:

    • Any person who has been committed to a hospital for treatment of a mental condition.

    • Perpetrators of violent crimes who have been found:

      • Not guilty by reason of insanity

      • Guilty but mentally ill

      • Mentally incompetent to stand trial

  • “Red Flag” bill, which closes a gap in Delaware law that makes it difficult for families and law enforcement to prevent at-risk individuals from harming themselves or others by removing firearms from potentially life-threatening situations.

    A law enforcement officer can obtain an emergency lethal violence protective order (LVPO) in Justice of the Peace Court if the court deems that a respondent poses a danger of causing physical injury to self or others by owning, possessing, controlling, purchasing, or receiving a firearm. 

  • Prohibit the manufacture, sale, purchase, transfer or delivery of large-capacity magazines, ammunition feeding devices that can accept more than 10 (amendment expanded it to 17) rounds and fire dozens of bullets without a person having to reload. 

    Included provisions to address residents who already own large-capacity magazines so that possession of a large-capacity magazine is only unlawful if it occurs in a public place. 

    Individuals would be able to keep their devices in areas that are not public places, or rent the devices for use at a shooting range.

  • Makes it a crime to buy, sell, transfer or possess a bump-fire stock, firearm attachments capable of modifying semi automatic rifles.

    The law will be enacted 120 days after being signed, and includes a compensation program and process for those to turn in their bump stocks.

Gun Safety

  • Establishes a framework for assessing needs and planning and implementing projects to improve the quality of the State’s water supply and waterways. 

    A Delaware Clean Water Trust account is created as a funding source for executing projects highlighted by this framework. 

    The Committee is required to develop and publish an Annual Report and multi-year Strategic Plan for Clean Water with annual updates.

  • This legislation encourages consumers to continue to dispose of their plastic bags through “at-store” programs. 

Environmental Protections

  • Bars employers from asking prospective employees their wage history: Using salary history to screen applicants is discriminatory and reinforces wage bias

    Salary expectations can be discussed so long as the employer does not seek salary history over the course of the discussion and negotiation. 

  • Establishes the Department of Human Resources, the Office of Women’s Advancement and Advocacy as well as the Delaware Women’s Workforce Council.

    The Office of Women’s Advancement and Workforce Council promote the equality of women, study the status of women in Delaware in an effort to eliminate gender-based bias and discriminatory practices. 

  • Gives state workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child 6 years or younger. 

    A worker must be employed by the state for one year in order to be eligible.

    Major Delaware employers such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, DuPont, AstraZeneca, Barclays and Merck already offer paid family leave to their workers.

Worker’s Rights

  • Adopts policies and procedures to provide Delawareans with the ability to vote by mail for the 2020 primary, general, and potentially special elections. 

    The bill established procedures for voting by mail mirror the procedures for absentee voting, including the policy that no ballots can be tabulated until Election Day.

Voter’s Rights

  • This Act requires all individual, blanket, and group health insurance policies to cover annual ovarian cancer screening tests for women at risk for ovarian cancer. 

  • Provides the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health with the ability to create regulations for and oversee a licensing system for recovery housing. 

    If the bill is enacted, operating sober homes without a license would not be able to receive referrals from an agency, a court of the state, or any entity contracting with the state as well as funding to deliver recovery housing services.

  • Creates and defines the term “annual behavioral health well check” as “an annual visit with a licensed mental health clinician” that must review the medical history, evaluate adverse childhood experiences, use appropriate mental health screening tools, and include anticipatory behavioral health guidance”. 

    This legislation also requires all carriers operating in the state of Delaware to cover an annual wellness check.

  • This legislation would require health insurers to pass along savings that companies see from the moratorium on the fee that was mandated through Federal Register Printing Savings Act. 

    This resolution will require the state to watch insurers and mandate insurers report on these savings to consumers.  

  • Health care costs amount to one-quarter, about $1 billion, of Delaware’s budget. 

    In conjunction with the Department of Health and Social Services Secretary, the health care spending task force would analyze payment reform and health care costs in an effort to implement an annual benchmark. 

  • Insurance companies offering health plans that cover treatments for advanced, metastatic cancer or other forms of cancer where the drug is supported by national guidelines or standards would not be able to limit or exclude treatments for patients if the treatments have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug

Healthcare

  • Removes outdated portions of Delaware code from the 19th century which allowed for the criminalization of women who had abortions. While this law has been inactive since the instantiation of Roe V. Wade, with its recent overturn, ensuring the removal of this stipulation from Delaware law is crucial.

  • Amends the Delaware Constitution to provide equal rights on the basis of sex

    The bill was previously approved in its first leg during the 149th General Assembly and is now included into the Delaware Constitution.

  • Delaware’s bill ensures equality for Delaware women

  • Does not negate Roe v. Wade precedent or expand when an abortion be performed

    Removes sections of Delaware law that have been found unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court so that women are guaranteed access to a safe and legal abortion.

Human Rights

  • Establishes a mental health services unit for Delaware high schools similarly to those for elementary and middle schools.

  • Provides more behavioral health support to school districts and charter schools in the aftermath of a school-connected traumatic event.

  • Provides excused absences for the mental or behavioral health of a student. 

  • Requires the State to fund a Mental Health Professional and Coordinator position for each district and charter school by the 2024-2025 school year. 

    The Mental Health Professional and the Mental Health Coordinator must develop partnerships with community-based organizations, work to establish collaborative relationships with the schools, families, and community to assess the district’s mental health needs. 

  • Provides for excused absences for the mental or behavioral health of a student and requires that any student taking more than 2 such excused absences will be referred to a behavioral health specialist.

  • Requires schools serving grades 6-12 to provide free products in at least 50% of all bathrooms. 

    Additional provisions are placed in the bill to ensure quality of the products selected and student awareness. 

  • Requires the instruction of consent in public schools

    School districts and eligible charter schools must provide age- and developmentally-appropriate, evidence-informed consent education to students in grades 7 through 12. 

    If signed by the Governor, SB 78 will require consent education programming to be ready in the 2020-2021 school year.

Students

  • Allows the Department of Correction to implement prison nurseries and allow women inmates that give birth during their time incarcerated the option of raising their infant up to the age of 18 months. 

    Any established prison nursery program must include educational and vocational components, a parenting and infant care education program, training for perpetrators and victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, and a discharge plan. 

    An inmate would be eligible for this voluntary program if she was pregnant at the time she was brought into custody, gives birth on or after the date the program is implemented and is subject to a sentence of no more than three years of incarceration

    HB 258 has been released from the House Corrections Committee. Due to potential programming costs, the bill may receive a fiscal note that could require its reassignment to the House Appropriations committee before debate on the floor. 

  • Strikes most drug crimes from the list of violent felonies and makes changes to the sentence modification section of habitual criminal law to conform to current practice. 

    Sentence modification due to serious medical illness or infirmity, good cause, or prison overcrowding. 

    Removes certain impediments to eligibility to sentence modification

    Removies provisions establishing the Sentencing Accountability Commission and creating the Delaware Sentencing Accounting and Guidelines Commission instead. 

  • Provides sentencing judges with the discretion to sentence prison time concurrently when appropriate but mandates consecutive sentences for many of the most serious crimes or for assault in a detention facility. 

  • Offers expansive expungement opportunities to adults

    Under this Act, a person may have a record expunged through a petition to the State Bureau of Identification (SBI) for: 

    • charges resolved in favor of the petitioner

    • a record that includes violations only after the passage of 3 years

    • some misdemeanors after 5 years. 

    Excluded are convictions for any misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence, misdemeanor crimes where the victim is a child or a vulnerable adult, and unlawful sexual contact in the third degree. 

  • Establishes that the age of offense and not the age of arrest determines jurisdiction for a person facing charges. 

    Reverses this procedure so that if the offense occurs before the age of 18 and the arrest is after a person’s 18th birthday, but before their 21st birthday, the Family Court will have jurisdiction. 

  • Ensures that feminine hygiene products are provided free of charge to inmates housed in the Department of Correction and at facilities operated by the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families. 

  • Reforms and modernizes the language of the crime of sexual relations in a detention facility and adds a prohibition on any sexual activity between law-enforcement personnel and persons in custody.  

  • Provides mandatory expungement eligibility to individuals who were convicted of the possession, use or consumption of marijuana prior to Delaware’s decriminalization of these offenses. 

    To be eligible for the mandatory expungement, the marijuana conviction must be the applicant’s only criminal conviction.

Incarceration

  • Permits an individual who is a reproductive health care services provider to apply for participation in Delaware's Address Confidentiality Program. 

Individual Protections

  • Authorizes the creation of Family Justice Centers within Delaware to provide victims of crime with a single source to obtain resources and support services.

  • This legislation upholds the nationwide trends to hold juveniles charged with adult offenses in juvenile facilities pretrial, instead of in adult facilities, so they can have access to educational and rehabilitative programs. 

    Juveniles could only be transferred to adult facilities under this bill only after adjudication and an imposition of a sentence of incarceration.  

Criminal Activity

  • Reforms the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit so it is refundable. 

  • In an effort to close a looming budget deficit, lawmakers increased the state’s portion of the transfer tax by 1 percent in 2017. That 1-percent increase was also split 50-50 between the buyer and seller.

    This legislation exempts first-time homebuyers from paying the buyer’s share of the 1-percent increase and creates a credit. 

    First-time homebuyers will be exempt from paying 0.5 percent of the first $400,000 of a home’s selling price, or a maximum of $2,000. 

    Retroactive; so any first-time homebuyer who purchased a home in Delaware on or after August 1, 2017 will be able to apply and receive a refund through the Delaware Division of Revenue. 

Financial Legislation

  • Aligns Delaware law with the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act: Requires states to have policies in place that address the needs of infants born with prenatal substance exposure. 

    Mother or caregiver would help develop a safe care proposal for the child

  • Requires schools to collect data on out-of-school suspensions and incorporate policies that include restorative practices, trauma-informed care and cultural competency. 

Child Safety

  • Raising the minimum legal age of tobacco product sales from 18 to 21 years. 

Substances