Kansas Legislative Issues

Kansas Legislative Issues

This area of the KNRC web site is dedicated to informing you about matters related to
the Kansas environment that involve the state legislature.
If you want to help us maintain this service, please JOIN THE KNRC!

	Read a sample of our weekly email update on the legislature The KLUE
	Committees responsible for most bills relevant to the environment (see House and Senate pages)
	Tips on how to communicate effectively with your legislators.
	Bills in play in 2012- All the bills we are following this session
	Useful links for following legislation
	The tentative Legislative Schedule for the 2012 Session.
	For a summary of how to track legislation online, see below.

KANSAS LEGISLATIVE LINKS

Kansas Legislature Main Page

Find out who is your representative or senator

Main Legislative Bills Page
Search for and read full text of bills, track progress of legislation

The House and Senate Rosters

Main Senate page

Main House page

House and Senate Committees

The Kansas Water Office has a list of state legislation related to water at:
http://www.kwo.org/news_government/News_Government.htm

The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks maintains a watch list of outdoor resource related legislation at:
http://www.kdwpt.state.ks.us/news/KDWPT-Info/Legislative-Update-Report

The Kansas Chapter of the Sierra Club also tracks Kansas legislation. Their website is at:
http://kansas.sierraclub.org/LegUpdates.htm

Legislative Calendar:

	Monday, January 9 First day of 2012 session
	Monday, January 30 Last day for member or members to REQUEST to have bill drafted
	Monday, February 6 Last day for Committees, except House Appropriations, Calendar and Printing and Taxation, House and Senate Federal and State Affairs, Senate Ways and Means, or other select committee, when authorized, to REQUEST to have bills drafted.
	Wednesday, February 8 Last day for Individuals to INTRODUCE bills.
	Friday, February 10 Last day for Committees, except by committees listed above, to INTRODUCE bills.
	Friday, February 24 (Turnaround Day) Last day to CONSIDER BILLS IN HOUSE OF ORIGIN, except by committees listed above.
	Wednesday, March 21 Last day to CONSIDER BILLS NOT IN HOUSE OF ORIGIN, except by committees listed above.
	Saturday, March 31 No bills considered after this date except BILLS VETOED BY GOVERNOR, OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS ACT

HOW TO TRACK LEGISLATION USING THE INTERNET

Without going to Topeka in person, you can do a passable job of keeping up with the process by using the information available on the Internet. A brief description of the tools available is below. Your main sources of information are the Calendar and Journal for the House and Senate.

A word about document formats

Note: Some documents on the legislature website are presented as pdf downloads. PDF files require Adobe Acrobat Reader software. If you do not already have this software you will need to get it. It is available for free from Adobe Systems at: http://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html

If you have Acrobat Reader, you may still need to update it for everything to work right. The current version is X (January 2010). You can determine if your version is current by clicking "Help" and then "Check for Updates Now".

If you left-click on the link for a pdf file, the file should open within the browser window using the Acrobat Reader plug-in, but sometimes that does not happen because of incompatibility issues with different versions of Internet browsers. The best way to get the document is to RIGHT-click the link (on a Windows computer) and choose the option of "Save Target As". The file will then download to your computer and you will be able to open it from there.

If you go the "right-click and save" route, you will then have the pdf file resident on your computer and can open it anytime you want without having to be on the Internet. You also will not have to use the "Back" button to return to the page you started with.

Communicating with a Legislator

You can find complete contact information for any Legislator by using the House and Senate Rosters including their email addresses, other contact and basic biographical info, their mailing address, Capitol office, committee assignments and other useful information.

As a convenience, the KNRC website lists the members of the committees that handle most environmentally-related matters and their email links.
House committees are here.
Senate committees are here.

For voice communication, use the toll-free Legislative Hotline to contact your legislator. Leave a message with your name and number and topic of your call and request they call you back. That number is (800) 432-3924 and is available 8-5 on days the legislature is in session. If you are in Topeka, you may call 296-2149 instead.

If you have comments on a bill that you want placed into the record, there is a defined procedure you should follow. If you are going to send in comments, it is best to go through a member of the committee handling the bill or your own representative or senator to insure delivery. If your legislator is not on a committee considering a bill you are interested in, don't let that stop you from sending in comments. When a legislator is serving on a committee they have a broader charge to represent all Kansans, regardless of where they live.

The Calendars are prepared each day, but cover only what either chamber will be doing that day when they meet together as a whole. Near the beginning, the Calendar lists bills that are being sent to committee that day along with their subject line. (To read the full bill, you have to download it separately.) Thus, reading each day's Calendar is a good way to keep up with new bills. Of course, as the session proceeds and the deadlines for introduction of bills are passed, you will see fewer and fewer new bills listed. However, some types of bills can be introduced later than others so it is still useful to keep an eye on this even late in the session. Lower down in the Calendar is a list of the bills that are up for vote by the full body on that day and the order in which they will be considered. The Calendars always show ALL bills that are available for them to consider as a chamber of the whole. In reality they never consider every bill on that list until the very end of the session or on �turnaround day� when bills have to make it through a chamber to stay alive. Rarely do all the bills listed on the House or Senate Calendar actually get voted on the day they are listed, usually only the first few and sometimes one or none.
All Calendars, from the first day of the session up to the current one, are linked from
the Main House page or Senate page.

If you want to read a bill, go here:

http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2011_12/year1/measures/

Either scroll through the list on the left or type the bill or resolution number in the search field on the right and click the submit button. You will then be taken to a page where you can download the pdf file of the current version of the bill. As the session progresses and a bill is worked, the bill will be revised to show any amendments made to it. Amended versions have bold text at the very top showing which body made changes. Those changes will be shown in different fonts corresponding to which body made the changes. Any text that is deleted from the previous version will have a line through it. Often you will also find download links on this page for fiscal impact of the bill or supplemental notes. The supplemental notes incorporate a "plain language" version of the bill and sometimes its intent and/or who supports or opposes the bill, so they are very useful. The history of the bill will also be on that page.

If a bill is revising a previous statute, you may need to read that statute to understand the full intent of the bill. You can read the statutes on this website. You will need to scroll down and read the chapter headings to get into the relevant area of the law you are interested in, or if you know the statute number use it to drill into the resource. This is not the official State of Kansas website for statutes. That is here, but it is not intuitively navigable. If you want to you can get the statute number from the other website and use that to drill into the official website - if you can.

Lastly, if you want to get more of a feel for what was said and how the different members voted, you need to read the Committee Minutes and the Journals . These are the official record of those meetings.

The Journals are posted fairly quickly, usually by the evening of that day. They are an abbreviated "minutes" of the full body. They tell what happened on the day in question, including recorded votes. Reading them thus gives some hindsight on what happened on a given day in the full body.
They are linked from the Main House page or Senate page.

The Committee Minutes are - eventually - also available on the web. Some committees get their minutes online quicker than others, so depending on which committee you are tracking, you may not be able to get them as quick as you would like. Some committees will also post submitted testimony from proponents and opponents, which can be interesting reading. To access the minutes for the House and Senate committees, navigate to that committee's web page:

That's it! By using these tools you too can follow what is going on under the dome. While this is no substitute for being there in person, it is nonetheless a definite improvement over just reading the paper or watching the 10 o'clock news! To summarize:

	Look ahead by using the Calendar
	Read the bills (and any of the statutes they may be modifying)
	Track the bills to find out when votes were taken
	Look up the Journal and Committee Minutes to see who voted yea or nay

And, of course, you can always visit the KNRC website for updates!