By MARY SELL, Alabama Daily News
The Legislature has a new website, www.legislature.state.al.us, that officials hope will make tracking bills and monitoring legislative action easier for the public.
Improvements include better search features, including the ability to search bills by topic across multiple sessions, and allowing users to create lists of priority bills they want to track throughout the session.
“You’ll be able to get so much more information off of this new website than you’ve ever been able to get before,” Secretary of the Senate Pat Harris said Tuesday at a State House tutorial.
The site went live on Monday.
Besides information on the House and Senate, the site also includes links to committee room livestreams — most committee meetings in the upcoming session are expected to be broadcast online — and the Legislative Services Agency, which keeps updated budget proposals throughout the session, and Examiner’s of Public Accounts.
“(The former site) was hard to find things, it was hard to navigate things,” said Jeff Lucas, developer for the new website from Pinch Hitter Solutions. “…It took too many keystrokes to get things done.”
The new site is also more friendly for smart phones and requires fewer browser windows. It allows the public to find their elected representatives’ contact information and sponsored bills in fewer clicks.
The former site is no longer available.
The new site is coming online just in time for the Legislature’s 2022 Regular Session, which begins Tuesday.
“Hopefully, this will make the session even better,” Harris said.