[LWVNM Action] Legislative codes

[Akkana Peck]

In tonight's Action committee meeting, Meredith raised another snag: apparently legislative days are different for the House and Senate, in other words, the House might "roll the calendar" as Karen describes, but the Senate doesn't, so now the House legislative day is different from the Senate one.

I asked what that means in terms of the legislative day shown on bill pages on nmlegis, e.g.
https://www.nmlegis.gov/Legislation/Legislation?Chamber=H&LegType=B&LegNo=365&year=25
where you might see something like:
    Legislative Day: 9
    Calendar Day: 02/24/2025
    HEC: Reported by committee with Do Pass recommendation

That's a House bill. So it says it got a Do pass on Legislative Day: 9 which was calendar day 02/24/2025. But apparently if you're looking at a Senate bill that had some action on Legislative Day: 9, it might be a completely different date.

My head hurts.

        ...Akkana

Karen Wentworth via Action writes:
> Akkana-
> 
> Legislative day does not correspond to real days. It is a legislative device to keep them legal. They cannot report a bill out of committee and act on it the same day so they “roll the calendar” and move to the new legislative “day.” It is meant to give the public time to react to legislative action, but it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it is just a way to move legislation quickly.
> 
> Karen
> 
> > On Jan 29, 2025, at 7:20 PM, Akkana Peck via Action <action at mailman.swcp.com> wrote:
> > 
> > In tonight's meeting I said I would send out information on the obscure bill status codes on nmlegis.gov, things like "[15] DNP-CS/DP-SJC".
> > 
> > I had to decode them for the BillTracker, so I wrote up a section for the BillTracker help page:
> > https://nmbilltracker.com/help#nmlegisglossary
> > That's based on this help page on nmlegis:
> > https://www.nmlegis.gov/Legislation/Action_Abbreviations
> > 
> > The trickiest part is "legislative day" (e.g. the [15] in the status I quoted above); there's no way I know of to figure out what calendar date a given legislative day corresponds to. But fortunately most of the time you don't really need to know when something happened.
> > 
> > There was also a good discussion of who uses which methods to find out about bills. I took some notes, but everybody has different methods (and some of us, like Ed and me, scrape information from the legislative website in order to present it in what we think are better ways). I'd like to collect these and make an updated version of the "how to use the legislative website" that's been part of the Advocacy Workshop for years (and I don't think it's changed in years): https://www.lwvnm.org/Action/advocacy/using-nmleg.html
> > 
> > So if anyone has any favorite tips for where you find useful information, please share!
> > 
> >        ...Akkana
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> 
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