By Aram Peterson, Solution Architect / Advisor
Aram presented an OLIS tutorial at Legislative Process Day on Nov. 7, 2023 and offered an extensive Q&A afterward. He followed up after the event with the extended explanation below. Dive into OLIS with an expert!
The question was, “Where can I see what bills the governor has signed?”
My first answer was the Senate Journals, and House Journals listed on the Secretary of the Senate’s site, or the Chief Clerk’s site, (links located under the Senate or House menu on the main public website). That answer was correct, but as I mentioned these may not be published until sometime after session. They have a section in those documents for “House Measures Signed by Governor” or “Senate Measures Signed by Governor”.
However, there is a daily “Joint Status Report” publication that is automatically re-generated daily during session that also lists all Measures signed by the governor.
To get to this publication, click on the More menu, then expand the Reports/Documents section, and look for the “Daily and Cumulative Session Publications”.
In the page that loads, the top should be a section for Cumulative Session publications, and the one you’ll want is the “Joint Status Report”. In some cases, if this publication gets too big, there may be a separate one for the House & Senate, but in any case, you’re looking for the Status Report. (This publication is only available in a “Regular” session, during an interim it’s not generated.) Click to open the PDF.
Inside the PDF, the page number is going to be different each time, but just search in the PDF for the key phrase “SENATE MEASURES SIGNED BY GOVERNOR”, or “HOUSE MEASURES SIGNED BY GOVERNOR”. There will be a table with all the measures signed up until that point. I believe it will also list in another nearby section any bills vetoed or line item vetoed (if there are any).
You can find this same publication for prior sessions. It’s generally refreshed daily until a couple months after session and all signings are input. So, to get it for a prior session use the Session Menu to choose the session you want, and then follow the instructions above, More Menu, expand reports, etc.
There are a variety of other sources of information on the More menu, and I would encourage anyone to just browse around.
An additional page to highlight is the “New and Updated Measure List”. This page will list all measures that have had any new versions published during the day. In other words, all newly Introduced bills, and any bills amended, or engrossed will appear on this list. Because the push of the new bill text content is generally done around 6 PM, during normal business hours you’ll want to generally click the arrow to go back to the prior day.
This page won’t show much except during session, but during session it’s a great page to check daily for anything new. You can click the link to open the PDF of whatever is “new” right from the list.
Another item under the More menu that you may find interesting is “Floor Letters”. These are the letters that members have requested their Desks office to leave on the floor desk for their fellow members. The submitted date should be the day it was left on the desk.
This page lists all floor letters submitted by any members for that session. Floor letters are also shown on the Bill Overview page (if they are related to a specific bill), but this page on the More menu will list all of them, regardless of if they are bill related or not.
I wanted to mention one additional thing regarding the e-subscribe. There is a link on the Bill Overview page for each bill to subscribe, BUT as I indicated that is only active during session. There is also an e-subscribe link in the lower left corner in OLIS, that should be listed no matter which page you’re on. This will take you to the page on the public website, where you can sign up at any time.
We didn’t manage to get to the Committees menu, but it works similar to the other things we covered. You can expand the Type sections (Senate/House/Joint, etc.) and click on the committee you want to view. And then browse through all the info related to that committee. On the right side is a list of all meetings scheduled for that committee, you can click the meeting date, and then will see all the details about that meeting. For session committees (only session committees can hear actual measures) you can expand the date, (little blue arrow to the left of the date) and it will show all the measures scheduled for that meeting, click on the measure for more detailed info. The little play icon will play the recorded video for that meeting. If you don’t see the blue arrow, that means there were no actual measures on the agenda.
