February 7, 2007

State Senate Makes It Easier To Track Legislation

Want to know what legislation your state Senator has sponsored or co-sponsored, and be able to track the progress of that legislation online? You can - just click here, find your senator, and then click the icon located in the right column under the heading "sponsor list." (If you are unsure of who your state senator is, there is a search tool at the bottom of that web page. Also, this map may help.)

Also, if you want to track bills by subject, you can do so online here. For example, you can see a list of all filed bills impacting sales taxes, or education or public records, or immigration.

Update: When I posted this item at 7:30 a.m., only the Senate website offered the lists of bills sponsored by each legislator, so I emailed Steven Kriegish, the director of the legislature's Office of Information Services asking when the sponsor-list info might be available online for the House members. He emailed back a short time later announcing that it had just been made available. You can access it here.

Great! Now I'd like to suggest a Phase 2 improvement: Providing a direct link from each legislator's web page, and from the House and Senate members' lists to the online campaign contributions database for each legislator.