FAMLI Regulatory Engagement Sessions

The Division of Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) is a new and growing team within the Maryland Department of Labor.  The FAMLI team is tasked with establishing and administering Maryland's paid family and medical leave insurance system. A large part of our work in 2023 will be drafting the regulations that will govern the system.

We are inviting stakeholders, community groups, and interested members of the public to participate in an informal regulatory engagement process. This informal process does not replace and is in addition to the formal regulatory process governed by the Administrative Procedures Act, which will begin as usual after proposed regulations are published in the Maryland Register. 

We have identified you as being potentially interested in our informal regulatory engagement process because you either testified on the authorizing legislation (the Time to Care Act) or recently contacted the Department of Labor regarding FAMLI. We hope you join our open and collaborative process for setting the rules that will make FAMLI a reality in Maryland. 

There will be six “phases” to the process, corresponding to six policy areas we have identified as benefiting from substantive public engagement. For each phase, we will first release a discussion document that lays out areas for discussion and comment. We will send this document by email and post it on our website. One week after the release of each discussion document, we will hold a public meeting by video conference where members of the public can sign up to provide comments on or responses to one or more of the topics covered in the discussion document. Several weeks after each meeting, we will circulate a draft that pertains to the policy area under discussion in that phase. We invite you to provide written comments on each draft. 

• Our first public meeting for our informal regulatory engagement process will be held (virtually) at 1:00pm on June 6, 2023.This will be a preliminary session in addition to the six policy phases. During this meeting, we will review the process for these informal regulatory engagement sessions and accept public comment on our engagement process and the regulations as a whole. On or before June 2, 2023, we will circulate a discussion document with general topics of discussion to establish the scope for this preliminary session. 
• The first policy phase will begin when we release the first discussion document on June 7. The virtual public meeting for this phase is tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of June 15, 2023.  The policy topic for the first phase will be rules pertaining to employer-sponsored private plans. 
• Subsequent phases will be scheduled to begin every two-to-three weeks thereafter throughout the summer. We will publish a calendar in the coming weeks.

We hope to conduct a collaborative and inclusive process that will make the FAMLI system a success in Maryland. We look forward to engaging with you in open and candid discussions on the FAMLI system. If you are not interested in receiving emails from us, you can unsubscribe below.

Sincerely,

The Maryland FAMLI Team