Using BASIS: Slow-Moving Vehicle Bill First to Pass 2010 Session

[This post is long and technical.  Think of it as a puzzle to solve.  Or, if you just want to know about the bill skip down to the bottom of the post where you can find the text of the bill and my explanation of what it means.]

BASIS is the Bill Tracking website for the Alaska Legislature.  Like any rich tool, it takes some playing around with to figure out. 

As you can see there's a lot of information available there.  (Click the link above or the picture itself to go there.)

I went to BASIS to get the bill that was first to pass the House on Monday (and then the Senate on Wednesday.)  It was actually introduced last year and is about changing the speed limits for slow moving vehicles and allowing them to cross roads that have a higher speed limit.

I wasn't sure what the bill number was, but I knew it was sponsored by Sen. Stedman in the Senate and Rep. Peggy Wilson (there are two Wilsons now because Tina Wilson was appointed to replace Rep. John Coghill when he moved over to the Senate in October 2009 to replace Sen. Gene Therriault "who become the Parnell administration’s senior policy advisor for Alaska energy.")

So, on the page pictured above, right column, I clicked on "sponsor summary." [Actually I tried a lot of things before I found one that got me where I wanted to go.]  Sponsor Summary gets you to a page that has a list of House and Senate Members.  Stedman is on the right under Senate Members. 

Sponsor Summary - 26th Legislature

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House Members Austerman Buch Chenault Cissna Coghill Crawford Dahlstrom Doogan Edgmon Fairclough Gara Gardner Gatto Gruenberg Guttenberg Harris Hawker Herron Holmes Johansen Johnson Joule Kawasaki Keller Kelly Kerttula Lynn Millett Munoz N.Foster Neuman Olson P.Wilson Petersen R.Foster Ramras Salmon Seaton Stoltze T.Wilson Thomas Tuck

Senate Members Bunde Coghill Davis Dyson Egan Ellis Elton French Hoffman Huggins Kookesh McGuire Menard Meyer Olson Paskvan Stedman Stevens Therriault Thomas Wagoner Wielechowski

Clicking on Stedman gets you to a page which includes this list of bills on which he was the prime sponsor.  (A Sponsor, according to the legislative glossary (pdf) is:

An individual, individuals, or committee who authors or agrees to introduce a measure.

A prime sponsor is not listed in the glossary, but what I've picked up this week, it's really the person who introduces the bill.  So there can be a Prime Sponsor, whose name is in all caps on the bill, Co-Prime Sponsors (also all caps), and co-sponsors (lower case) who are asked (or who ask) to join in sponsoring a bill. Here's part of that page you get (before I got distracted with defining a prime sponsor) by clicking on Stedman:

Bills Spon/Co-Spon by SMN   [SMN is code for Stedman]

		PRIME	CURRENT	STATUS
BILL	SHORT TITLE	SPONSOR(s)	STATUS	DATE
PRIME-SPONSOR OF THE FOLLOWING BILLS
SB 24	LOUIS MILLER BRIDGE	STEDMAN	(H) FIN	04/08/09
SB 25	RICHARD DEWEY DUVALL FERRY TERMINAL	STEDMAN	(H) FIN	04/10/09
SB 59	LOW-SPEED MOTOR VEHICLES	STEDMAN	AWAIT TRANSMIT GOV	01/27/10
SB 132	SOUTHEAST ENERGY FUND	STEDMAN	(S) FIN	04/19/09
SB 164	WATER ACCESS EASEMENT WIDTH/NOTICE	STEDMAN	(S) CRA	03/25/09
SCR 4	ACCEPT FED. ECONOMIC STIMULUS PAYMENTS	STEDMAN	HELD ON SECY'S DESK	03/23/09

And there is SB 59 Low-speed Motor Vehicles.  If you click on SB 59 you get a page which includes the following information: 

01/25/10	1336	(H)	PASSED Y39 A1 [Passed in the House 39 yes and one abstention]
01/25/10	1339	(H)	CROSS SPONSOR(S): P.WILSON[Rep. Wilson sponsored the House version of the bill]
01/25/10	1339	(H)	TRANSMITTED TO (S) AS AMENDED [It was sent to the Senate]
01/25/10	1339	(H)	VERSION: HCS CSSB 59(TRA) [I think this means: House Committee Substitute, Committee Substitute Senate Bill 59 - in committee after discussion they made changes and replaced the original bills with substitute bills]
01/27/10		(S)	CONCUR MESSAGE READ AND TAKEN UP
01/27/10		(S)	CONCUR AM OF (H) Y19 N- E1 [ 19 yes, and I'm not sure about the E, perhaps it means excused absence, but I'll check]
01/27/10		(S)	AWAITING TRANSMITTAL TO GOV [Now it's off to the Governor for his signature]

Below is the top of the page you get if you click on HB 59:

If you click on "full text," you get a list of different versions of the bill.

Full Text of SB 59

			Intro/Offered	Passed
Version	Amended Name	PDF	Date	House	Senate
SB0059A	SB 59		01/21/2009
SB0059B	CSSB 59(TRA)		03/05/2009
SB0059C	CSSB 59(TRA) am		04/13/2009		04/13/2009
SB0059D	HCS CSSB 59(TRA)		04/15/2009	01/25/2010	01/27/2010

• The first is the original Senate Bill (SB).
• The second is the Committee Substitute of the original Senate Bill (CSSB). TRA refers to the Transportation committee where this bill was heard.
• The third is the amended (am) version of CSSB (I'm not spelling this out since I just explained it above.  If you don't remember, go up three lines and look.)  This means the Senate bill came to the House transportation committee (TRA) and they made some changes and so they substituted their new version which in legislative code becomes HCS CSSB 59 (TRA).
• The fourth is House Committee Substitute (HCS) of the CCSB.

[Note, I think I've got this right, but I've only been studying this political dialect for a week, so I could be missing something.  Trust me, this is much easier than Thai or Chinese. Think of this as a puzzle to solve, like a crossword puzzle or a Suduko.]

So, now, if you click on the last one - which is the final version because it's dated 4/15/09 which was at the end of the 2009 legislative session (the Twenty-Sixth legislature spans two years, 2009 and 2010, so bills introduced last year are still in play this year) and it also has the dates 1/25/10 and 1/27/10.  One of the previous pages - Bills Spon/Co-Spon by SMN -  listed the actions on the bill.  And the last two were in the House and Senate this week when the bill was passed - on 1/25/10 in the House and 1/27/10 in the Senate.   So, we want to click on the last version then, which is the one that was passed on the floors of the House and Senate.

If you click on HCS CSSB 59(TRA)  [Remember?  That's House Committee Substitute of the Committee Substitute of Senate Bill 59 from the Transportation Committee] you'll get a  the wording of the bill.  [You can double click on the bill to enlarge it.  It's in two separate image files, so click them both to enlarge them both.]

 You may be wondering what this is all about and that wouldn't be unreasonable.  If I hadn't sat in Rep. Wilson's office the other day and listened to her explain it, I wouldn't have a clue.  Even so, I took the opportunity today at a reception at lunch to ask her again to explain some of the reasoning behind this.

Someone in Sitka, I believe, bought an electric car in Washington State and brought it home.  Other people in Petersburg got similar cars.  They go up to about 35 miles per hour.  But the Sitka owner had his car souped up a bit so it could go 45 mph.  But the Department of Transportation said the statues prohibit slow-moving vehicles from operating on roads with speed limits over 35 mph.  [The regular type in the bill is the old language and the bold and underline type is the new language.]

So this bill, first, makes it so he can drive his car on roads with a 45 mph speed limit.  But the Department of Transportation, if I remember this right, was opposed to this in the more congested areas of the state where they think it will be more dangerous.  So a lot of that language is to restrict this to smaller communities.  While the people that wanted this were in Petersburg and I think Sitka, where they have some of these vehicles, it would also apply to places like Bethel that is not connected to Anchorage or Fairbanks by the road system.  [I'm not sure why they needed to include both Anchorage AND Fairbanks since they are connected to each other by the road system and thus one or the other would do.]  The 35,000 population is in there to allow this to apply to Juneau.   And finally this only applies where the local government has approved of this. 

Section 2, about the intersection, is in this because in Petersburg, in order to get (I forget exactly where, but someplace they want to go regularly, like the market) they have to cross a highway where the speed limit is 65.  But slow-moving vehicles are not allowed on such roads.  So this bill doesn't let them drive on such roads, but does let them cross them at intersections.

So, that's a primer on using BASIS to track down and read the first bill to pass in the second session (2010) of the Twenty-sixth Alaska Legislature, plus some background on why they used the language they used.