House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville, announced a new public dashboard for House bills today, giving citizens the same electronic access to bills, proposed amendments and red-lined versions of legislation that lawmakers have during the session.
The new dashboard is a continuation of Sexton’s efforts to provide better and more timely access to proposed amendments, which on the main General Assembly tracker do not appear with bills until they’ve been adopted by the committees. Lawmakers, however, have long had access to additional information in real-time — as soon as amendments are filed with a committee.
“Tennesseans want transparency in our processes, and they deserve to know more about the legislation that we are proposing and attempting to pass in the House,” Sexton said in a press release after announcing the change on the House floor on the second day of the 113th General Assembly. “This new Dashboard application will give Tennesseans the same access as their representative in real-time and make the legislative process the most transparent in Tennessee that it has ever been.”
Members of the public, lobbyists and journalists have complained that proposed amendments are not added to the bill pages of the legislature’s website until after they are adopted in committee, sometimes causing confusion for those who don’t have an inside track to what is happening with each bill.
A few years ago, Sexton started requiring House committees to list all proposed amendments on bills before the committee met, but even though this was an improvement, they were sometimes hard to find because they were on a long PDF list that got even longer and more complex as the session moved into its busiest days.
The announcement by Sexton of the new House dashboard on Wednesday met with applause from the House floor.
You can find a link to the dashboard on the main House page, listed in the right column as House Dashboard. To access the dashboard, you must enter your name and your email address and create a password.
So far, the dashboard is sparsely populated, showing only the consent calendar from the second day in session. But as committees get underway, bills will show up along with amendments, fiscal notes, a legal summary and supplemental documents.
The dashboard is expected to also have access to red-lined versions of bills, showing the changes the proposed bills would have on existing statutes.
No changes have been announced for the Senate’s bills.
