HELENA – It might have seemed as if lawmakers were finished saying “aye” and “nay,” but over the weekend they were sending in votes from across the state to decide how they’ll busy themselves during the interim.
A poll due back this week asked all 150 legislators to rank the importance of 17 interim study proposals. Of those, about a dozen will make the cut and be assigned to an interim committee.
“It depends which ones are the biggest priority and what other demands are placed on a committee,” said Dave Bohyer, research director with Legislative Services.
In past years, Bohyer said, lawmakers have had to choose from as many as 40 different study ideas.
But even with only 17 options before them this time, the roster should offer something for nearly everyone: there are proposals to study health care, fire suppression, DUI laws, recycling, income tax filing, family development, processing plant material into energy, DNA evidence storage and more.
All told, the studies and committees will cost the state about $700,000 in travel, postage, copy costs and other expenses. That money has already been appropriated, but lawmakers still need to decide how many and which of the proposed studies to fund.
After the rankings are returned, an interim Legislative Council of Republicans and Democrats evaluates the results.
“They just kind of take the lead ones that went through the session and try not to overload anyone,” said Senate President Bob Story, R-Park City, who is currently the council’s acting chair.
Interim research is often a means of dealing with complex issues that would require a lot of collective tinkering to become a measure with wide appeal.
For example, lawmakers earmarked $200,000, on top of the $700,000 in general funding, to look at the state’s retirement systems in response to pension funds’ plummeting value.
Areas where agreement has been elusive are also common — take the $20,000 set aside this session for reviewing taxes on the oil and natural gas industries or a resolution directing legislators to look at failed bills that sought new rules on state employees’ bonuses.
“The majority of the time bills do come out of the studies, and I’d say the bills that do come out are usually successful, they usually make it through the process,” Bohyer said.
About 40 bills emerged this past session from an interim study focused on reducing firefighting costs, after a season of runaway blazes in 2007 forced the state to call a special legislative session.
About half of those 40 were introduced and passed, said Sen. Dave Lewis, R-Helena, who served on the committee that studied firefighting costs.
“I think that as long as the committees are bipartisan you get buy-in from both sides of the aisle,” Lewis said.
Yet some topics, such as climate change, are too divisive for even a study to reconcile differences.
Last interim, lawmakers on the environmental committee considered ways to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. But battles over whether global warming is real led instead to “milquetoast” legislation focusing on conservation, Sen. David Wanzenried, D-Missoula, said during the session.
“I’m not a big believer in interim studies,” said Sen. John Esp, a Republican from Big Timber who chairs the Committee on Committees. “On the odd occasion one of them accomplishes something that people grab on to, but for the most part they do not result in legislation that passes.”