[LWVNM Action] Legislative codes

[Akkana Peck]

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