Stateline : Changing State Legislature, The

EVERY year about this time, observers of the state legislative scene begin to focus on the next legislative session. With 44 states scheduled to hold sessions in 2000 and with a big Presidential election year coming up, the most frequently asked question is, What are the hot topics for education? It's a good question, but maybe a more important question is, What are the changes and quirks in the legislature itself that need to be watched? Term limits and the initiative process are two big variables, but buried beneath such issues are the committee structure, the use of staff, the control exerted by the leadership and party caucuses, and even the length of the session. Given a similar distribution of the same hot topics across all state legislatures, some of these internal variables might alter significantly what a particular state legislature will accomplish. And when the lobbying process, union strength, and the historical attributes of strong state control or strong local control are added to the mix, the issues themselves sometimes become secondary. State Legislatures Differ Looking from the top down, most state legislatures look pretty much alike: two legislative bodies, a committee structure, and similar leadership titles. Only Nebraska, with its unicameral legislature and deemphasis on political parties, can be said to be distinctly different, but more on this later. William Pound, executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), writing in State Legislature, the NCSL magazine, in the summer of 1999, described the modern state legislature and some of the changes that have affected the institution in the past 25 years. He divided the states into three distinct groups but then added a fourth, the states with term limits in place: The [states in the first category] are those that are professionalized, a group that includes highly unionized states with large populations, such as California, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Jersey. These legislatures tend to have higher compensation, unlimited time in session, large professional staffs, and members who define their occupation as legislator. The second category comprises about half the states and is best described as transitional, having some characteristics of both the highly professionalized legislatures and the more traditional citizen legislatures. The states in the third category (about 15) are termed traditional legislatures. They are generally limited in session length, have higher turnover rates, and members who do not see legislative service as a career. These legislatures are found primarily in New England and the less populous agricultural states of the Midwest and West. The 1990s brought about what may become a fourth category of legislature & those with term limits. Eighteen states throughout the country now have limits on the time members can serve. As term limits become more widely implemented, the differences between legislatures with term limits and those without will be significant. Most observers of state legislatures tend to watch one or a small number of states and assume that the sample at hand is the norm. But the length of the session and whether the state has an annual or biennial session usually have a direct impact on the size of the staff. And when a state is large enough to support duplicate partisan staffs or individual members each have their own staffs, then action and work change dramatically. Pound's article & and indeed that entire issue of State Legislature & reviewed the 25-year history of the National Conference of State Legislatures. Pound reminded his readers that in 1941 only four states held annual sessions. Today, that number has risen to 43 states. The states that still hold biennial sessions are Arkansas, Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Texas. …