MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A bill that would enact significant reforms to the Alabama Board of Pharmacy, which regulates pharmacists in the state and was found in a recent audit to have regularly acted outside its authority, passed out of a Senate committee Tuesday with an amendment, as well as some support and opposition during a public hearing.
House Bill 123 would increase the board’s membership from five to nine members, as well as mandate that the makeup of the board represent the diversity that exists in the pharmacy industry. For instance, two members must be pharmacy technicians, one a hospital pharmacist.
The sponsor, Rep. Kerry Underwood, R-Tuscumbia, has said the bill is an effort to address the issues that have plagued the board in recent years. It was found to have issued higher fees than what is permitted by state law and violated open meeting laws.
“You’ve done good work on this,” said Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, the chair of the Senate County and Municipal Government Committee, speaking to Underwood after having introduced his bill. “This was a bit of a mess, and you’ve done good work on this.”
Sen. Keith Kelley, R-Anniston, who had worked extensively with Underwood on the bill, introduced an amendment that would do two things; require the board to adopt and publish fee schedules for various violations, and amend the nomination process for board members.
Under existing law, the governor appoints all members of the Pharmacy Board, whereas under Underwood’s bill, the governor would appoint three, the lieutenant governor, two, the House speaker, two, and the Senate president, two. They must choose among a list of names for each seat submitted by various organizations, such as the Alabama Pharmacy Association, which under HB123 would provide names for five of the nine seats.
Under Kelley’s amendment, the board seat that would be required under HB123 to be filled by an at-large pharmacist would be selected among names provided by the state’s two public pharmacy schools at Auburn and Samford universities, whereas previously, the APA was to provide names for that seat.
After the amendment’s adoption, the committee began the public hearing portion of the meeting, where John Linna, director of Pharmacy at Senior Care Pharmacy near Tuscaloosa, pushed for the APA to be the organization to provide names for an additional seat, specifically the seat to be filled by an institutional pharmacist, which caters to assisted living homes.
Kelley told Alabama Daily News that the intent behind his amendment was to introduce more “balance” so that “one group doesn’t have total majority of the board.” Joseph Kreps, an attorney from Birmingham, argued that even with Kelley’s amendment, which reduced the number of seats the APA provided names for, APA’s influence would still be too great on the Pharmacy Board going forward.
“I think we need to look at the Alabama Pharmacy’s Association’s control over the board; if you go back and look, since 2011, 12 of the 16 board members were prior APA presidents or heavily involved,” Kreps said. He had signed up to speak as a proponent of the bill.
“I think APA’s longtime control of this board led to many of the significant findings in the Sunset report, so I think it’s very important that APA not have a majority of five spots on this nine-member board.”
One Pharmacy Board member, Johnny Brooklere, who owns three pharmacies in the Birmingham area, spoke out against the bill during the hearing, and asked instead that lawmakers give the board a year before attempting to fix the issues with legislation.
“The board has addressed, and/or is addressing all the issues from the auditor’s report,” Brooklere said. “Make no mistake about it, we started immediately addressing those issues.”
Having passed in the House last month, the bill is next slated to be debated on the Senate floor, which Kelley told ADN he anticipated happening sometime next week.