Virtual File - Item

Text: History of Committee Deadlines, 1971-2010
Peter S. Wattson
Secretary of the Senate (Legislative)
January 20, 2010

The first committee deadlines were adopted in 1971 as part of the Permanent Joint Rules. There were two deadlines, one for bills in the house of origin and one for bills in the other house.

The third committee deadline was added in 1994. It applied to appropriation bills acted upon by a policy committee and was intended to get appropriation bills into the Finance and Ways and Means Committees by that time so they could assemble their omnibus bills.

1999
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 6 established deadlines. The Joint Rules were amended to take the deadlines out, since it had been ten years since the last Permanent Joint Rules had been adopted in 1989 and the leadership thought it would be easier to adopt deadline dates if they were not tied into adoption of Permanent Joint Rules.

2000
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 10 established deadlines for the 2000 session.

2001
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 5 adopted deadline dates. But faced again with inability to adopt Permanent Joint Rules, the Senate agreed to a House concurrent resolution to establish a Task Force on Joint Rules. The Task Force, chaired by Representative Mark Olson and Senator Hottinger, met in the fall and winter of 2001 and recommended, among other things, that the structure of the deadlines, but not the dates, be added back to Joint Rule 2.03. The structure included in their report was the structure as it had been in effect under the Temporary Joint Rules of 2001. The recommendations of the Task Force were introduced in both houses in the 2002 session as a concurrent resolution adopting Joint Rules but were not acted on by either house.

2003
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 4 changed the meaning of the third deadline so that, rather than being a deadline for policy committees to report appropriation bills to the Finance and Ways and Means Committees, it was a deadline for Finance and Ways and

Means to report the omnibus appropriation bills to the floor. The resolution applied only for calendar year 2003.

2004
In 2004, there was no agreement on a deadline resolution. The Speaker and the Chair of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration each issued a memorandum setting deadlines for their respective bodies. The Senate had only the first two deadlines. The House had a third deadline for committees to act favorably on omnibus appropriation bills. The deadline did not apply to the Committee on Ways and Means, so it had the same effect as the deadlines in effect from 1994 to 2002.

2005
The Temporary Joint Rules for the 84th Legislature, adopted in 2005, amended Joint Rule 2.03 to insert the structure of the deadline rule as recommended by the Task Force on Joint Rules. That structure was based on the deadlines used in the 2001 session, not the deadlines used in the 2003 session. The third deadline was for committees to act favorably
on "major appropriation and finance bills." But the deadlines did not apply to the Committees on Finance or Ways and Means, so they operated as deadlines for the House finance committees to get their bills to Ways and Means, (as was the case from 1994 to 2002 and again in 2004) not a deadline for Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committee to report their bills to the floor (as was the case in 2003, the last time both bodies agreed to a deadline resolution).

In 2005, Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 4, adopted by both bodies on February 28, set three deadline dates for the 2005 session and named the 15 different "major appropriation and finance bills" that were subject to the third deadline.

2006
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 8, adopted by the Senate on opening day (March 1) and by the House the next day, set three deadline dates but did not list the major appropriation and finance bills.

2007
House Concurrent Resolution No. 1 , adopted by the Senate February 19, set the first and second deadlines on different days in the Senate and House: March 23 for the House and April 14 for the Senate. The third deadline was for the divisions of the Senate and House Finance Committees to act favorably on omnibus appropriation bills by April 2. A fourth deadline was created for the Majority Leader of the Senate and Speaker of the House to set conference committee budget targets by April 27.

2008
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 8, adopted by the Senate February 12 and by the House February 18, set three deadline dates.

2009
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 5, as amended by the House, was adopted by the Senate February 9. It added a fourth deadline - for the Finance, Ways and Means, and Tax Committees to act favorably on omnibus appropriation and tax bills - and a fifth deadline - for conference committees on omnibus appropriation and tax bills to report bills to the floor. The fifth deadline was deleted by House Concurrent Resolution No. 1 on May 7. Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 6 adopted Permanent Joint Rules for the first time since 1999. It amended Joint Rule 2.03 to establish a new deadline for state agency bills necessary to implement the governor's budget. It said they must be made available for introduction within 15 calendar days after the governor's budget was submitted.