Whips outline tiered overhaul of interim committee process, plan surveys and public input

Sen. Michael Padilla, Senate majority whip, opened a working-group meeting July 17 to advance recommendations for restructuring the legislative interim committee process, saying the goal is to make interim work more policy-focused and better connected to session work.

Padilla said staff had reviewed past efforts and that the group was charged by the legislative council to address three concerns: there are too many interim committees, committees have too many members and the interim process is not as effective as it could be. Jared Fleetwood, project coordinator for the Legislative Council Service, briefed the group on prior reviews and recommended Janelle Mason's memo as background.

"This working group was created by the legislative council last spring, to kinda tackle the 3 notions that there are too many interim committees," Fleetwood said, urging members to read the memo to better understand how the interim process evolved.

The whips discussed a consolidated, tiered committee structure that would pair a limited number of "tier 1" interim committees with session standing committees and allow those tier-1 committees to form smaller subcommittees for focused work. Padilla described the tiers as a way to reduce repeated presentations across multiple committees and to produce clearer interim workplans that would be submitted to the legislative council for approval.

Rep. Day Hockman Vigil, House majority whip, said the tiered approach could help the legislature concentrate policy work and avoid recycling the same presentations across multiple bodies. "I think this represents the our last agreement as to where everything should go," Hockman Vigil said.

Rep. Alan Martinez, House minority whip, supported chair training and stricter attendance measures to improve continuity and quorum. Members discussed limiting lawmakers to two tier-1 committee assignments and enforcing removal for repeated absences; one proposal was to remove members after three missed tier-1 meetings.

The group also debated how membership ratios would be determined. Fleetwood said statutory committees follow membership prescribed by statute while council-created committees typically mirror the chamber's partisan ratio, so some changes would require statute revisions while others could be handled through council policy.

Padilla proposed using a member survey to gather priorities across the Legislature and converting a draft of the group's recommendations into survey questions. "I own a very, robust, SurveyMonkey, license," Padilla said, offering to transform the working group's draft into a questionnaire for all 112 legislators. Members agreed to include public input during a later meeting before finalizing recommendations for presentation to the legislative council in November.

Staff confirmed the working-group meeting dates as July 17, Aug. 28, Sept. 18 and Oct. 26 and said the group aims to produce a near-final draft by the third meeting for polishing and approval at the fourth. Fleetwood cautioned that some changes may require two documents'a bill for statutory changes and a separate council policy change.

Lisa Morrison, a staff attorney, encouraged including staff in surveys so their perspectives are reflected. Padilla closed by asking staff to assemble a living document of reforms and a parking-lot of issues (party ratios, number of tier-1 assignments per member, knockout rules for membership) for the next meeting.

The working group adjourned after confirming next steps and the meeting schedule.