Legislative Prefiles and Drafts

A customer recently asked if you can track prefiles on State Net. Here is the answer the Solutions Consultant wrote:

Yes, you can add prefiled bills to your private file and get updates on them. The Question is about text is a tricky one though and is dependent upon which state you are looking at. State Net covers prefiles in all states but not all states prefile in the same manner. Some states prefile the bill and the bill number stays the same from prefile through introduction. For these states, the status updates are seamless to track as the status will be continuous from prefile through introduction. These state are easy to Monitor. Below is an example of an Arkansas bill that follows this logic:

On the other hand, some states produce prefiles in “draft” form and the draft then has to be later introduced as a separate "introduced" bill. Wyoming is an example of a state that prefiles with drafts and then when the bill is later introduced, they do not provide a notice that the introduction as tied to a previous draft. Further complicating this process is that some of these states have text of these drafts and others do not.

Some state that draft do make it easy to link the draft with the actual intro. Below is an example of a New Hampshire Draft which is directly linked to the introduced version. You can see in the sample that NH LSR 12 was later introduced as NH H 201.

For those that do have the clear connection between the draft and the intro, we have an optional tool we can setup that will move all customer information that is added to the draft, over to the intro when it is linked. The program runs over a client’s private tracking file to look for drafts that have been introduced and converts the draft number to the bill number, keeping associated tags, commentaries and attachments with the new bill number.  It is used for the following states: CT, IA, MA, ME, MT, NH,  NV, OR

For the above example: If I put NH LSR 12 in my private file with Tag:X on 10/3 è after program run on the night of 1/6, I would no longer have the LSR in my file, but I would have NH H 201 in my file with Tag:X still assigned. If you would like this setup, please contact us here.