This bill must compete for today's time with other major issues like welfare reform and a multi-million dollar tax cut, but sponsor St. Louis City Representative Pat Dougherty is hopeful.
"When they did the welfare law, one of the biggest things they were attempting to do is to decrease the burden of the state on taxpayers to pay for somebody else's children," said the House Children Committee Chairman, Rep. Pat Dougherty, D-St. Louis.
The House bill is sponsored by Pat Dougherty, D-St. Louis. It would allow the Child Support Enforcement Division to seek penalties against parents who are more than $2,000 in arrears or 3 months behind in their support payments.
House Children Committee Chairman Pat Dougherty, D-St. Louis, the sponsor of the legislation, said he sees the measure as primarily a threat to get people to pay up.
Rep. Pat Dougherty, chairman of the House Children, Youth and Families Committee, said he will be introducing a bill in the next two weeks that will look at making the child support enforcement system more efficient.
"We are trying to change that," said the sponsor of one of the bills, Rep. Pat Dougherty, D-St. Louis. "We are trying that the release of identifying and non-identifying adoptive information apply to adoptions completed before and after August 13, 1986."