Lege 101 – the website

By Craig McDermott

While I (and others) try to cover the activities of the Arizona Legislature and provide commentary and insight into those activities, as individuals we can't cover every single facet of the lege that could interest every single reader.

There is a resource available that allows web surfer to learn about legislative topics that interest them, though – the legislature's website.

Those of you who are already familiar with the lege's website can stop reading right now, because everything that is covered in the rest of this post qualifies as "basic."

The inspiration for this was a question from a regular reader about some of the features of the lege's website.  Her question made me realize that while I am very comfortable with navigating the site, some very knowledgeable, passionate, and active Arizonans aren't as familiar with it (yes, that's a long-winded way of saying "I'm a geek" 🙂 ).

So here are some basic tips for the lege's website to get those folks started –

The URL of the lege's website is http://www.azleg.gov/.

That brings you to the main page.

The focus of this post will be the menu of options that stretches across the top of the page, but there is one item of interest further down the page that I want to mention.  Approximately halfway down the page is the link to the video archive of the lege's floor action and committee meetings.

Click on "Click to visit our Streaming Video Archive" to go to the archive page.

That page has both links to videos of past meetings and a link to live streams of current meetings.

Back to the top of the page…

There are eight items in the horizontal menu at the top of the page – Senate, House, Legislative Council, JLBC, More Agencies, Bills, Committees, and Calendars/News.  Scroll over those headings for a drop-down menu of options.

While there are some differences, the "Senate" and "House" menu options are roughly similar.  The highlight here are the ways to access the member rosters for each respective chamber.  From those rosters, a user can select a legislator and view information about that legislator's committee assignments, contact info, and bill sponsorships/cosponsorships.

The items of interest under the "Legislative Council" option are links to the Arizona Revised Statutes and the Arizona Constitution.

The "JLBC" option doesn't offer a drop-down, it just takes you to the website of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.  JLBC studies and evaluates the state's fiscal situation.  That is where readers want to go to learn more about the state's revenues and expenditures.  If you visit this one, keep lots of Pepto-Bismol and Alka-Seltzer handy.

"More agencies"  provides links to a number of legislative, executive, and judicial branch agencies.

The "Bills" option is perhaps the most useful for the average person, and the one that will get the most attention here.

When someone scrolls over "Bills", a drop-down appears with "Bill Info" as the top choice on the list.  Clicking here brings users to a page where they can view lists of House or Senate bills, sorted by number.

From here, one can select a bill and view all sorts of information about it.

The "Bill Status" link brings the user to a page listing the sponsors and cosponsors of the bill, a list of actions related to the bill (when it was read in one or the other chamber, what committees it was assigned to, committee votes, floor votes, ultimate disposition of the bill, etc.)

The "Sponsors" link show the user a list of the sponsors of the bill.  The first name listed is the original sponsor, any names listed with a "P" are primary sponsors, and those listed with a "C" are cosponsors.

The "Bill Versions" link shows the user the different versions of the bill – as introduced, and House Engrossed and Senate Engrossed (if a measure gets that far).

The "Bill Summary/Fact Sheets" link brings the user to a list of the summaries of the bill written by legislative staff for the various committees.  Very handy in the case of longer bills, but not to be relied upon entirely – generally the staffers doing the writing are employed by the Republican leadership.

The "Adopted Amendments"  and "Proposed Amendments" links takes the user to lists of just that, adopted and proposed amendments.  Since those amendments are written based on the underlying bill, they often don't make sense in their "stand-alone" versions.  Reading the entire bill or a bill summary written after the amendment was adopted may be necessary to understand the effect of the amendment.

The "House Agenda," "Senate Agendas," "House Calendars," and "Senate Calendars" links bring you to pages that show when the bill is scheduled for committee or floor action.

Lastly, the "Bill Video Archive" link will show users a list of videos to view, showing the committee and floor considerations of the bill in question.  There is a weakness to this, however – the list shows all activity for a given bill number during a given year, so if there is a special session (or, as with 2009, *many* special sessions), a bill number may be reused many times (ie – HB2001 was used, and abused, a number of times last year),  It's best to know when the bill you are interested in was up for consideration.

Back on the main page of the lege's website, the second-most useful link in the main menu is the "Committees" link.  Scrolling over that brings up a drop-down menu of options that include –

"Standing Committee" – a list of links to each chambers' permanent committees

"Interim Committee" – a list of links to the various temporary, ad hoc, and special committees

"House Agendas," "Senate Agendas," and "JLBC Agendas" – lists of links to the agendas of upcoming committee meetings, useful for planning out visits to the Capitol or online viewing sessions.

"Conference" – a list of conference committee meetings and agendas.  This one is rarely used.

On the main page, the last menu option is "Calendars/News.  While there are other options in the drop-down, the highlights here are "Press Releases" and "Capitol Events".  The purpose of the press releases option is obvious, and "Capitol Events" provides a calendar of events at the lege that are not initiated by the lege itself.  Mostly, it's a list of various lobbyist schmooze-fests at or near the Capitol.

OK.  That's a very brief (yet still way too long) introduction to the legislature's website for interested citizens.  In many ways, it barely scratches the surface of what can be found on the site, but since this is a blog post and not a novel, this is a good break point.

As the session wears on, other topics will be covered as appropriate.

Wait'll we start seeing strikers, aka "strike-everything" amendments, aka "How to turn a merely bad bill that would clarify laws related to divorce into an anti-choice monstrosity."