Small, seemingly unimportant items get lost every year amid the mad scramble toward the adjournment of the General Assembly.
The honorables file hundreds of bills -- thousands during so-called long sessions in odd-numbered years when anything and everything can be debated.
It's no surprise that the overwhelming majority of bills don't generate much attention and that some legislators don't follow up on their own bills after they've been dealt with. Stuff happens and attention wanders, especially when such small matters as passing a $21.4 billion state budget crops up.
Yet amid that circuslike atmosphere, state Rep. Dale Folwell, R-Forsyth, kept close tabs on S.B. 1651 -- a version of legislation he sponsored that carried the extremely unsexy moniker of "technical corrections bill" -- and found the time to tout its unanimous passage in both the House and Senate.
The bill, with the original short title of "Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act," cleared up some unclear legalese about shortening the organ-donation process in North Carolina and lowered the minimum age for donating blood from 17 to 16.
"This one little thing can save thousands of lives," Folwell said.
Expanded pool
Unlike some other bill-happy legislators, Folwell tries to limit the number of bills he works on. To do that, he follows a very simple set of personal guidelines.
"It has to have one of three components," he said. "It has to lower the cost of the government doing business, raise the return on something the state is already involved in or change behavior (of people) in regards to something we're trying to fix."
In the case of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, the General Statutes Commission found a flaw in a law passed last year that established the heart symbol found on driver's licenses indicating a person's desire to be an organ donor as a legally binding, first-person directive.
(Previously, the heart was treated as merely an indication of someone's intent to donate. Next-of-kin still had to OK the process, a delay that could have caused early and unnecessary deaths of people waiting for vital transplant organs. The new law also established an online registry, www.donatelifenc.org, which makes it easier to change one's donor status.)
"It's complicated and I'm no genius, but the commission felt that the first bill didn't do enough to protect law-enforcement officers from liability if they went into someone's pocket to check their driver's license for that heart symbol," Folwell said.
Somewhere in the process of fixing that technicality -- hence the term "technical corrections bill" -- the provision lowering the age of potential blood donors was added.
"As we speak, there is only a one-day supply of blood in North Carolina," Folwell said. "This just expands the pool of donors."
Other reasons
Besides a basic desire to be an effective representative, Folwell has other reasons for his diligence -- personal reasons that he will discuss reluctantly, even though he would prefer to focus elsewhere.
First was the death of Dalton, his 7-year-old son, who died May 17, 1999, after being struck by a driver who passed a stopped school bus. As a result of that terrible personal tragedy, Folwell learned even more about the life-preserving power of organ donation.
Next came the deaths of Tim Dillon, a close friend who died after a stroke in 2006, and Jason Ray, a mascot for UNC Chapel Hill who died in March 2007 after being hit by a car.
Dillon had indicated on his license that he wanted to donate his organs, but by the time his family was contacted it was too late. And Ray's gift of life through organ and tissue donations has helped more than 100 people.
"I know you have three to five minutes to ventilate someone in order to preserve their organs and to give the organ-procurement people the hours it can take to find matches," he said. "I thought about all three and what we could do to change things for the better."
Ratified July 8 with zero fanfare, the bill does just that.
■ Scott Sexton can be reached at 727-7481 or at ssexton@wsjournal.com.
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