Notifying the public

Alert watchers of the Legislature observe that, just as Maine winter snowstorms turn into a spring of freezing rains, so too do lawmakers annually turn from the relatively civilized stroll of the two-weekend notice for public hearings on legislation to the frenzied one-weekend (or less) sprint for notices to complete a budget on time. It happened again last week, so if you’re planning to attend a hearing from now until the end of the session, don’t count on the longer notice.

It is Joint Rule 305 that provides the two-weekend notification in the state’s major daily newspapers, telling the public when and where hearings are scheduled so that the machinations of bill making can fully benefit from public contributions. The rule may be waived if both the Senate president and speaker of the House agree. This often happens if a committee, for instance, schedules a handful of bills all concerning the same issue, then later receives another on the same topic. Rather than schedule two hearings on the single issue, the rule is waived and the late bill is added to the others.

There’s nothing nefarious about this; just an attempt to move lots of legislation in a limited amount of time. Still, reduced notification means reduced public involvement, occasionally to the point of there being very little public about the hearings, unless you count the input of the lobbyists who spend their days haunting the hallways of the State House. The notification problem is probably the best reason around for lawmakers to limit the number of bills introduced and for leadership to ensure in January that the workload allows for proper public participation throughout the session, and not just at the beginning when fewer of the most important votes are taken.

Last week, as in previous years at this point in the session, the speaker, Michael Saxl, and president, Michael Michaud, looked at the time left, the pile of bills still to consider and the budget fight ahead and decided that moving things faster was the only way to clear out of Augusta before the tourists arrived and found out that Maine does not, in fact, exist solely as a setting for L.L. Bean catalog shoots. They waived Rule 305 entirely, reducing the notice time to a single weekend, and even that standard can be waived if needed. Bill followers now may have as little as a day’s warning to raise hell in a committee room.

Technology in the form of a Web site provides a way to keep up with the Legislature’s changing schedule: janus.state.me.us/legis. Choose session information and look for the bill you are interested in. For those happily off-line, call the legislative information office at 1-800-301-3178. The staff there is especially helpful and can answer all kinds of questions, including, for instance, what happened to the two-weekend notification.