State Sen. Bob Dixon is concerned for the future of Legislative Research - and told his colleagues last week its budget changes could affect the Legislature's operations.
Although Legislative Research has several duties required by state law, one main function has been to "draft or aid in drafting bills, resolutions, memorials and amendments and render any other service in connection therewith for any member of the general assembly."
But Adam Crumbliss, the House chief clerk, said Friday a disagreement about bill drafting has been brewing between the House and Senate for several years.
"For a long time, you had the Senate doing their own drafting - but the House did not have their own drafting shop, so we used Legislative Research," he explained. "Some of the challenges that we had to deal with, periodically, were frustrations with getting things in a timely fashion, not really knowing exactly when, or how, we might get records and documents back."
Crumbliss said there also has been some discussion about having "one, centralized drafting unit for both houses. While I think that's the ideal situation - realistically, we were never going to be in a position where we were going to see the Senate give up its drafting authority."
So, he said, over the last few years the House developed its own staff for drafting bills and amendments, and decided that, "rather than having three drafting agencies, we should go to two - and use a similar model for both so that we weren't in the position where you had competing situations and systems."
The House wanted to cut the Legislative Research operations to nothing in the 2015-16 state budget, but the Senate wanted to keep the funding as it had been.
Appropriations Chairman Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, told Dixon the compromise was keeping a $550,000 budget and the equivalent of eight full-time employees.
"I was very, very alarmed with what the House did," Dixon, R-Springfield, told Schaefer during debate on the final budget bills. "They dropped a nuclear bomb down there."
Dixon said at least part of the problem may stem from some lawmakers' misunderstanding about the schedules Legislative Research must follow - like asking the office in mid-summer to write a bill to be considered in the General Assembly session the following winter, when "the folks in Legislative Research are wise enough to realize that you don't start drafting (new) bills until the ones you just passed go into effect in August."
Crumbliss said Friday the Legislature's real challenge is "the responsibility of trying to modernize, automate and, really, manage things much better, more tightly and efficiently than we have before."
He acknowledged some duplication is required, because the House and Senate are trying to get things done at the same time - including writing, printing, debating and changing bills and producing daily journals of that work.
Dixon worried lawmakers "don't even realize the ramifications, yet," of the House approach to cutting back on Legislative Research operations.
Crumbliss told the News Tribune the House approach is fiscally responsible.
"We need to at least do something that makes sense for taxpayers, so consolidating down to two units is better than three," he explained, "and that's kind of where we have made the decisions that we have."
Dixon noted Legislative Research does more than drafting bills.
Schaefer said the budget keeps their work as the revisors of statutes and their responsibility for printing new statute books.
"They're getting ready to reprint the statutes, when the (revised) criminal code goes into effect in 2017," Dixon said. "We decided not to, in order to save money, print the statutes again in 2010, (even though) they were printed in 2000 and, by statute they're supposed to be printed every 10 years."
Crumbliss said he and Dixon likely "have different perspectives on what our long-term vision is."