It really is going to be a looooong session:
INDIANAPOLIS — The 117th session of the Indiana General Assembly doesn't open for business for another month, but the process of lawmaking is already under way. More than 900 requests for assistance have been submitted by state lawmakers to the Legislative Services Agency, the bill-drafting and research arm of the legislature.
Many of those requests are proposed pieces of legislation still in the embryonic stage of development, which is why their contents aren't public yet.
[. . .]
Last year, during the legislature's “short session” — which occurs in even-numbered years and goes until mid-March — lawmakers introduced 811 bills, according to the LSA. Only 115 of those were enacted, passed by both the House and Senate, and sent on to Gov. Mitch Daniels for his signature.
In 2009, during the long session — which occurs in odd-numbered years and must end by April 29 — there were 1,328 bills introduced. Of those, 184 were enacted. The governor vetoed three of them and allowed one to become law without his signature.
In the 2007 long session, lawmakers filed 1,420 bills. With additions and revisions and all the hard-paper copies required to be produced for distribution to lawmakers and others, the LSA had to print nearly 5 million pages of bills at a cost of about $250,000. The switch to electronic records — which means access to bills online — has reduced the paperwork load but not eliminated it.
Legislators apparently suffer from the delusion that our regulated lives still need a lot of fine-tuning and only they are wise enough to do it. The number of bills introduced is approaching 1,500, but the number passed stays below 200. Considering how expensive it is for the LSA to get all the proposals researched and properly written, Hoosiers aren't getting a very good deal.
Comments
Unless they've changed things since I've been there, LSA is pretty much a sweatshop during this time of year. The price-per-bill is really quite a value for the citizen.
Of course, quality might be a concern. I recall, at one point, being a brand new lawyer, making something like $30k/year, being asked to write a bill to make our telephone regulatory scheme "like Wisconsin's." I worked like hell on that thing for about a week - my deadline - and I'm sure it was a piece of crap. Glad it never went anywhere.
That's probably the exception, though; not the rule. I had the privilege of working with some fine lawyers at LSA who were able to turn some pretty vague notions or poorly written drafts into functional legislation. (Whether that legislation was good or bad was never our call to make - we just had to make it work.)