The Session Subscribe: Apple Podcast | Spotify  Week 1 | Sausage Making and an Early GOP Divide EPISODE DESCRIPTIONHost Shaylee Ragar discusses tech issues at the Capitol with reporters Austin Amestoy and Zeke Lloyd. They break down what that means for how the public and reporters alike can follow and engage with the action in Helena, along with the bigger picture of public comment during committee meetings and a new development on legislative junque files.EPISODE TRANSCRIPTShaylee Ragar:  We’ve made it through week two of the 69th Legislative Session. Lawmakers, lobbyists, reporters, and the public are still trying to figure out how to get the information they need to fully participate in the legislative process. This is The Session, a look at the policy and politics inside the Montana State House.I’m Shaylee Ragar, I’m with Montana Public Radio.Austin Amestoy:  I’m Austin Amestoy with Montana Public Radio. Zeke Lloyd:  I’m Zeke Lloyd, Montana Free Press.Shaylee Ragar:  Welcome Austin and Zeke. Austin, we know you from Morning Edition, all your awesome reporting, you did cover the 2021 legislative session. Thanks so much for being here.Austin Amestoy:  Once a ledgehead, always a ledgehead, Shaylee. Thanks for having me. Shaylee Ragar:  That is so true. Zeke, you covered wildfires over the summer. Now you’re up here at the Capitol covering politics. How’s it going so far for you? Zeke Lloyd:  Well, they talked me into it pretty well, the move from wildfire to politics, but it feels alarmingly similar and everything is still on fire.Shaylee Ragar:   That is too true, Zeke. And it is funny because there has been a bit of a fire in the first couple of weeks here, which is our new legislative website. It’s the first time in decades the state legislature has updated its website, and people are finding it tricky to use. We want to focus this episode on public access and how the public can engage with the legislature, and this is one of the most important elements of that.How are you guys finding this new website? Austin Amestoy:  Yeah, Shaylee, I think tricky is a pretty good word to use. The new software has appeared to have issues giving accurate info. For example, I’ve seen conflicting dates and times for bill hearings, there’s been wrong information, even about committee votes on bills.One bill I was looking at yesterday said, for example, it had passed out of committee on a 22-8 vote, which is actually about 10 more members than the committee actually has. Shaylee Ragar:  Zeke, what about you? How are you finding it?Zeke Lloyd:  Well, I think the important thing to remember is that even with a website that works perfectly, you’re going to have a lot of confusion and slow moving parts and government. So when you add in some of these errors, it just starts to feel impossible.Shaylee Ragar:  That’s such a good point, Zeke, because any website that’s new is going to have some bugs. There’s going to be a learning curve to figure it out. This website shows when bills have been introduced. It shows when bills have hearings in committee. It shows how lawmakers have voted on those bills, like Austin said. It is a one stop shop for figuring out the legislature and finding all the information you need to interact with the legislature. And I spoke with a veteran lobbyist, Jen Hensley, about this. She is a former commissioner of political practices, she’s been a lobbyist for decades, and she’s been having a hard time with this as well. Here’s how she described the experience to me.Jen Hensley:  ”It feels like I’m doing battle with the system to get information that the system’s trying to provide.”Shaylee Ragar:  And before we get deeper into the weeds of the problems with the website, I want to kind of talk through and explain the information that you can find on the website, what should you be looking for to begin with, and those are the essential functions of the legislature. One of those first building blocks is legislative committees. So what can you tell us about committees, Zeke?Zeke Lloyd:  The legislature as a whole sees more than a thousand bills every session, so it’s just too much to put right onto the floor of the Senate or the House of Representatives. They make these small groups of lawmakers called ‘committees’ and they focus on specific topic areas.Shaylee Ragar:  There are a couple of key points in time when the public can engage with a committee. So what are those times that people should be watching for when they’re thinking about participating in a committee?Zeke Lloyd:  This is why I love Montana, because you really have a lot of opportunity to engage in the bill making process. Committees hold public hearings where everyone can comment on a bill, all you have to do is show up at the time the committee is hearing the bill, and you can say your piece, whether you like the bill,  you don’t like the bill,  so really, any person in the state can come to the legislature  and go to the committee at the time they’re hearing a specific bill and weigh in on that legislation.  Of course they also have an option to weigh in virtually, and you can do it from anywhere in the state as well.Shaylee Ragar:  After committee votes, let’s say they decide to advance a bill. Talk us through what’s next, what’s the life of a bill? Zeke Lloyd:  We have two chambers, so essentially a bill that’s going to go through the House is going to have to go through the Senate as well. So let’s say they’ll start in a House committee. Let’s say it makes it through, it’s going to go then to the House floor,  let’s say the House says, ‘yes, we love this bill we’re going to pass it through the House’, well now it has to go to a Senate committee. Then the Senate’s going to talk about it in committee. Then it’s going to go to the Senate floor, if it makes it through that committee, and then the Senate has to pass it. So keep in mind that that’s really two opportunities for you as a Montanan to weigh in on the bill, both in its initial committee in the first chamber and in the second chamber it goes to in that committee. Shaylee Ragar:  I guess it is important to note too, legislators are always soliciting opinions and advice from their constituents. So if you miss the bill hearing, send an email, send a letter, call your legislator throughout that process. Zeke, what would you say are your top tips for engaging with the legislature? Zeke Lloyd:  You make a great point and while the website has some shortcomings, one thing it does really well is enable people to participate.So there’s kind of a one stop portal on the website where you can figure out how to attend the committee you want to go to, leave a message for an entire committee about a bill they’re reviewing, just leave a message for one to five lawmakers specifically. In terms of advice, being able to bring that personal side of why you really care about this, and then mixing in a little bit of ‘this is why we all care about this’, that’s a really tough line to walk, but if you can bring that personal narrative, as well as that larger zoomed out vision of why this matters to the state, you’re going to be able to make a really big impact.Shaylee Ragar:  I also want to give a shout out to MPAN  as we call it, the Montana Public Affairs Network, that is a product of Montana PBS. They record every committee hearing, they stream them live, and as we’re having trouble with the website, MPAN is the fail safe way to find the information you need. So you can also find MPAN on the legislature’s website. That’s legmt.gov. It’s not just the tech issues though. There’s also a recent court ruling that has blocked some access to important documents.You’ve been following this issue, reporting on it a lot, Austin. Tell us about the ruling. Austin Amestoy:  Shaylee, we have to go back to last summer for this part. A district court ruling last year basically said communications between lawmakers and private citizens can be kept private if a lawmaker chooses to do so.This year, a nonpartisan division of the legislature we’ve been talking about, that’s legislative services–it writes bills for lawmakers, has interpreted that ruling to block public access to certain behind the scenes bill information in what’s known as a ‘junque’ file. You know, that’s not junk as in trash, that’s J-U-N-Q-U-E.  Shaylee Ragar: That’s right. So talk us through the practical impact of this ruling. How does it affect things day to day?Austin Amestoy:  Well, a little bit more background here, Shaylee, I think it’s important to establish the baseline we’ve been operating under for about 30 years prior to this session. Really, any member of the public could just walk into the Legislative Services Office or send them a message to get a copy of the full junque file for a bill.And the junque file contains information like early drafts of a bill, who asked for the bill and why they asked for it. Also, copies of communications between the lawmaker who asked for the bill and some of the organizations who In early support of that bill draft, think lobbying groups, private companies, or just regular old citizens.But this year, communications about a bill draft between lawmakers and anyone who’s not involved in government are being redacted or withheld completely from the public. Shaylee Ragar: Yeah, those junque files have really been so enlightening in the past when we’re recovering bills. But this lawsuit isn’t over yet, right?Austin Amestoy:  That’s right. Montana media organizations and some others have sued to reopen those files. Their basic arguments have been that Montana’s constitutional right to know means lawmaker communications have to be publicly available. Plaintiffs on that suit, I should point out, include Montana Free Press and the Montana Broadcasters Association, which MTPR and YPR belong to.We are waiting for a district court judge to decide whether to enjoin legislative services policy blocking access to those junque files at this point. Shaylee Ragar:   Austin, we learned that lawmakers were given a choice, kind of a blanket policy, that they could choose before the legislature started of whether they wanted to allow access to their junque files or not. What did you learn about that?Austin Amestoy:  As of the 15th of January, 65 lawmakers had signed that waiver allowing the public to request and view the behind the scenes information about their bills. For perspective, that’s a little more than a third of the full legislature, 150 people. 35 members of the legislature outright said, ‘No, you can’t have access to my private communications with third parties’ and 50 hadn’t responded.And that means, by default, their junque files are kept private. I do think it’s worth noting here, Shaylee, that the majority of those who have allowed access to the behind the scenes information and their private communications about bills are Democrats, while more Republicans have declined to allow that access. Shaylee Ragar:   What would you say is the big, broad impact of this on the reporting process? Austin Amestoy:  It’s really not just reporters who are impacted by this decision. It’s reporters, it’s lobbyists, it’s regular members of the public, and even other lawmakers I’ve been speaking to. It gives everyone less information about why a bill is drafted and who could benefit from a bill’s passage. And those private parties whose communications are kept private unless a lawmaker decides otherwise,  could be anyone from a small town resident with an idea to powerful companies working to pass legislation to help them out. And that’s why those junque files have been critical to reporting efforts for decades and really shining a light on the sausage making process of the legislature. This can sort of be viewed as another complication as we’ve been talking about in the already complicated story of public access to the legislature this year between the new website for tracking bills and hearings, having all the issues it’s having to this junque file issue. It’s just making it more difficult for even journalists to keep pace with the flow of legislation this session.So I think it’s pretty safe to assume that many Montanans who interact more casually with the legislature could pretty easily get lost in the weeds of it all. Shaylee Ragar:   Definitely something we will be keeping a close eye on, but I think we’ll leave it there for today. Before we leave, I’d love for each of you to please tell me your favorite moment from the last week. Zeke?Zeke Lloyd:  I fully moved in to the basement of the Capitol. I have meals down here, I have a coffee maker, caff and decaf, depending on the time of day, and I even have this little light, which mimics sunlight. So I could be here forever. And that’s kind of my dream come true.  Shaylee Ragar:  Zeke, nothing can replace fresh air. Please remember, please remember to take breaks. Austin, what about you?Austin Amestoy: Well, Shaylee, in the spirit of Zeke’s artificial light, if you’ve never overwintered in Missoula, you may not understand the long stretches of dark and cloudy days we have this time of year over here. Sometimes it feels like you’re in the basement of the Capitol and you’re just walking down the street.But just before the cold air came down on Friday, we got a full day of gorgeous blue skies and sunshine. I sunned myself on the couch with a book after I got off work that day. That’s enough to get the serotonin flowing again. Shaylee Ragar:  Oh, that sounds so lovely. I’m going to offer my favorite moment: I was talking to lawmakers about public access and asking them if they had any tips for our listeners about how to engage and I stopped Senator Mike Yakawich from Billings. He told me he misses a good old fashioned letter. Mike Yakawich: Cause you know what? You don’t put an email on your refrigerator, but you may put a card.  Shaylee Ragar: Some snail mail, as it were. And I will say us reporters love to get letters too. I do think email is a little bit faster. You can find our reporters’ information on our website mtpr.org or the Montana Free Press folks at montanafreepress.org.  This has been The Session, a preview of the policy and politics inside the Montana State House. Thanks for your reporting, guys. Zeke Lloyd:  Great to be here. Austin Amestoy: Thanks, Shaylee.The post The Session: Week 2 | New website, new problems, and how to get engaged appeared first on Montana Free Press.