New Arizona laws impact teen driving, abortion, taxes, responders
Aug 3, 2018, 4:45 AM | Updated: 11:56 am
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PHOENIX — A lot of new Arizona laws went into effect Friday.
Among them are tougher penalties for teen drivers caught texting and a ban on local governments taxing groceries or restaurant food that’s not already subject to state sales taxes.
Another law requires a woman seeking an abortion to state whether the request is because of rape or incest.
In addition, credit bureaus can no longer charge people to freeze their credit.
A decade ago, the Legislature voted to allow credit-reporting agencies to charge $5 every time someone wanted to lock their credit (to prevent identity theft or someone opening a credit account in their name).
The problem was, the fee applied each and every time the credit was locked or unlocked, and to each party. The three credit bureaus also got to charge a fee.
People will also pay an additional $4.00 per traffic ticket for police equipment and training.
As for first responders, the “Officer Craig Tiger Act” goes into effect. Among other things, the bill allows up to 36 counseling visits related to PTSD.
Ken Crane, president of the Arizona Law Enforcement Association, said the act has been a long time coming.
“We get consistency across the state for our first responders – which we did not have before,” he said. “A lot of other agencies around the state weren’t doing it … or some of them had lesser programs … some weren’t doing it at all.”
The law, Crane said, has a payment program for certain circumstances.
“For example,” he said, “if you start going to counseling, and two months later later they say, ‘Look, we think this is PTSD-related,’ you can get reimbursed for any personal-leave time you took up to that point.”
The act is named for late Phoenix Police Officer Craig Tiger. He lost his job in 2013 due to PTSD-related drinking problems; until that time, he’d never had a disciplinary record. In 2014, he took his own life.