[LWVNM Action] Legislative codes

[Meredith Machen]

Today was Legislative Day 10 in the House and 9 in the Senate.
Feel like Akkana in Wonderland?


Meredith Ross Machen
505-577-6337
Meredith.machen at gmail.com



On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 6:55 PM Akkana Peck via Action <
action at mailman.swcp.com> wrote:

> 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Action mailing list
> > > Action at mailman.swcp.com
> > > https://mailman.swcp.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/action
> >
> >
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