With graduation around the corner, gift cards are soon to be in demand. While the cards, which are offered by stores and banks, are handy, especially for relatives who may not have seen the graduate for years, they often come with hefty fees and a lot of restrictions. That may change if lawmakers enact a bill to make the cards more consumer-friendly by eliminating fees and expiration dates.

Gift cards recently surpassed clothing as the top gift choice. Last year, $50 billion was spent on the cards. Today, the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee will consider ways to make these cards a better deal for Maine consumers. LD 1084 would prohibit card issuers from charging dormancy fees, typically about $2 a month if the card has an unused balance after 12 or 24 months. It would also ban expiration dates on gift cards and certificates.

While such changes are beneficial, the Maine Merchants Association is rightly upset that other changes to gift card rules were included in recent budgets without much public discussion. The just passed budget for the next two years, for example, shortened the period of time after which an unused card is considered abandoned from three to two years. The budget included $5.7 million in revenue from this change.

This is important because outlawing dormancy fees changes how “abandoned” cards are treated. Even without an expiration date, a card is deemed abandoned if it is not used by the second calendar year after it is issued.

Currently, if a retailer does not charge a dormancy fee it can keep 40 percent of a card’s remaining value. The remainder goes to the state treasurer under the state’s abandoned property law.

The state treasurer tries to find the rightful owner through the office’s unclaimed property listings. Last year, $7.9 million was returned to consumers. Property that remains unclaimed now goes into the state’s general fund. If a dormancy fee is charged, the state gets all the money that remains on the card.

In New England, most other states have banned dormancy fees or are moving in that direction. Earlier this year, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that states should be allowed to restrict fees and expiration dates on gift cards issued by national banks. The opinion came during a lawsuit in which the country’s largest shopping mall owner, Simon Property Group Inc., which owns the Bangor Mall, said gift cards should be regulated by the National Bank Law, not individual state regulations. Federal regulators disagreed, backing efforts by Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire to enforce restrictions on fees.

This bodes well for Maine’s efforts to do the same.