On his blog, Director of Bill Drafting for the NCGA, Gerry Cohen reports that for the first time, the full text of floor amendments will be available on the General Assembly's website.
uploaded with a link to the bill status page. For example, there were
three floor amendments to Senate Resolution 1. For
those amendments prepared by staff, the barcode when scanned links the
amendment to the correct bill status page. The upload is NOT a MSWord
document, but a .pdf of a scan (note the three amendments to SR1 all
have handwritten material on them), and some floor amendments are
entirely in handwriting.
This is a great step forward for transparency. For anyone who has had to try and do any type of legislative research, getting floor amendments and figuring out what it meant has been some of the more difficult tasks to do. This will improve the system greatly.
Kudos to Mr. Cohen and the IT staff at the NCGA for this enhancement. Hopefully next on their agenda will be recorded committee votes and online copies of committee amendments.
Glad you liked it. As our next step, we are working on getting approved committee substitutes posted to the web when the committee report is turned in, rather than 2-8 hours later. Currently, we wait until the next edition of the bill is printed, (which is a few hours after adjournment) to post the committee substitute (with a number in the upper right indicating the edition number of the bill), now we hope to post the “D” (draft) version right away. Stay tuned.