Rep. Dvorak has a blog post entitled Bill filing and the legislative calendar which triggered memories of my days at the Legislative Services Agency. I left a herniated comment to his post, but thought I’d at least post a link here.
The deadline was this weekend for submitting bills to LSA and have them ready for introduction when the session rolls around the first week of January. This is the way it works every year and makes for a busy, work-filled holiday season at LSA. Getting Christmas Day off was quite the treat. And over at the Office of Code Revision (a subdivision of the Legislative Services Agency) sometimes we even got to take half of New Year’s Day off. Morale was especially high when the occasional legislator would swing by the State House to drop off a pile of bill request on his way out of the country for a Caribbean Christmas vacation for the couple of weeks between the bill filing deadline and the legislators coming back into session. (I’m not actually sure this ever happened — it may have just been an apocryphal tale told around LSA.) In any event, it was often difficult to get ahold of a legislator to discuss various details of some legislation. Sometimes you would just have to wing it.
I recall drafting a bill having to do with fees for recording documents with the county recorder. Apparently county recorders were getting requests for recording mailed in with checks that were larger than the amount of the fee. I guess they couldn’t do refunds or something, so they were returning the requests with instructions to resubmit with the proper fee. Occasionally, you’re going to have documents to record that are time-sensitive. Mostly, if the difference is a few dollars, the person trying to record it doesn’t care about the fee nearly as much as about getting the thing filed. So, the idea was to create legislation that would direct the recorders to go ahead and record the document despite the overpayment. There were no instructions on the bill request about what to with the overpayment, and I couldn’t get ahold of the legislator making the request. So, I figured, on the one hand, you didn’t want to burden the recorders with additional administrative hassles of making change and mailing it back. But, on the other hand, you didn’t want the recorder to pocket excessive amounts of money. So, I think I just drafted the legislation so that if it was within $20, the recorder could just record the document and deposit the money. Turned out — and I’m an awful relative for not realizing it — my aunt was a county recorder. She found out I was responsible for that $20 provision, and thought I was a most excellent nephew. The $20 provision was either amended out of existence or didn’t pass, so no harm, no foul on my guesswork.
Once again, I feel like Grampa Simpson with my meandering story, having no particular point.
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