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Show by Harry Marlowe Utah's legislative leaders are trying something new . . . and needed . . . just prior to the forthcoming 1955 session of the Legislature. That is the Dec. 17-18 pre-leg-islative session at which recommendations recom-mendations of the Utah Legislative Legisla-tive Council for streamlining legislative leg-islative procedure with be advanced. ad-vanced. Along with the report from the council will come some briefing in proger legislative procedure, how to introduce bills, brief sketches of rules and regulations and such. This will particularly be invaluable in-valuable td the new legislator and will also be of considerable value to the former legislator who is coming back to the halls of Capital Hill after long absences. George Fraodshaw, who is nearly a fixture in the House in his position as docket clerk, has come up with some solid research on this matter of streamlining the legislative processes. A Needed Change If any segment of government needed some modern touches it is the archaic procedure followed in the legislature. J Back in the days where 50 bills a session was a full load, there was no need of shortcuts. But these days, where some 500 bills come into each house per session, ses-sion, some valuable legislative man hours saved could be precious pre-cious commodity. There are some 70 pages of recommendations and reasons for such recommendations in the report, re-port, which is now being mailed out to the legislators. One of the major changes is in reducing and simplifying the titles of bills. Not only will this save valuable time in reading, considering the number of times the title of each bill must be read before final disposition is made, it will save considerable maney in printing costs. One other matter which will bear some serious looking into is a proposal to have bills prepared pre-pared for introduction prior to the beginning of the legislative session. ses-sion. This can easily be done if the pre-session meeting idea is continued con-tinued and expanded from two days to say a week. Other Recommendations Some of the other recommendations recommen-dations include cutting down the number of standing committees, hiring the legislative personnel in advance of the session and some needed rules changes to make procedure more uniform. One of the latter suggestions is to limit even further the debate 'opportunities of the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. The new rules, if adopted, would not lose these members their vote. Nor would it prevent them, on occasion, from turning i the chair over to someone else if they wished to speak on a certain matter. It would, however, seek to prevent pre-vent the Speaker or President from "exercising undue influence" influ-ence" on legislators during debate de-bate on any specified actions. Included in the reports are recommendations rec-ommendations for such things as multilithing, instead of printing, bills; placing appropriations on an annual instead of bienniel basis; sale of bills and journals I instead of free distribution as j now is the case; time limitations on bill introductions, floor speeches and committee actions on bills. The committee has also given much thought to advantages of combining some of the House-Senate House-Senate functions, such as setting up a joint mailing room. There definitely is food for thought in the recommendations. Some of them, naturally, will not yet work in Utah. Some may never work. But legislators, cither new ones or old ones, will find it well worth their while to attend at-tend pre season meets Dec. 17 and 18. . . |