Track Bills in the 2021 New Mexico Legislative Session (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Thu, 21 Jan 2021

Track Bills in the 2021 New Mexico Legislative Session

This year's New Mexico Legislative Session started Tuesday. For the last few weeks I've been madly scrambling to make sure the bugs are out of some of the New Mexico Bill Tracker's new features: notably, it now lets you switch between the current session and past sessions, and I cleaned up the caching code that tries to guard against hitting the legislative website too often. [NM Bill Tracker screenshot]

Why a mad last-minute scramble, you ask? Why didn't I do this in the middle of last year?

Well, that's not entirely my fault. With a site that scrapes live data off a website that's only updated for a few months out of the year, it's hard to do enough testing in advance. So once the House started pre-filing bills, there was lots of testing to be done.

Anyway, it's working well enough that I already have a pretty good list of bills on my personal tracking list. There are all sorts of interesting issues likely to come up this year:

Due to COVID, the legislature is meeting via Zoom, which may make it easier for people who don't live in Santa Fe to testify for or against bills they care about. In past years, I found the process of getting to the Roundhouse, sitting around waiting for a bill to come up (or not -- sometimes they jigger the schedules at the last minute), and finally waiting to testify, so daunting that I only had the energy to do it a couple of times. It'll be interesting to see if Zoom meetings are easier and what the rules will be for testifying.

Anyway, it's looking like it will be an interesting session! The LWV of New Mexico has lots of information on how you can participate. New Mexicans who want to follow bills can register on the NM Bill Tracker. And of course, let me know if you have any problems with it. I'm sure there are still some bugs hiding in there.

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[ 17:50 Jan 21, 2021    More politics | permalink to this entry | ]

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