Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include information about the 2024 legislative session.
The Kansas Legislature meets from January through at least early May each year, holding countless committee meetings and hours of floor debate, which frequently can last into the wee hours. Hundreds of lobbyists and a dozen or so journalists monitor what is said and done.
Thankfully, those far from the state Capitol can monitor the action from home. The Kansas Legislature documents most of its activities daily on its website, kslegislature.org. The Legislature’s website stores a wealth of information, but finding what you want can sometimes prove tricky.
To help our readers understand how to use the records available to the public, The Beacon has prepared a guide so anyone can follow the legislative session from home, even if that home is far from Topeka.
This post will be updated with links after the Legislature updates its website in January.
- When will the 2024 Kansas Legislature meet?
- How do I find out who my lawmakers are and how to contact them?
- How do I know which bills have been filed in the 2024 Kansas Legislature?
- How do I search for bills on a certain topic?
- How do I check the status of a bill?
- What happens to a bill when it is sent to the governor?
- Can I watch a committee meeting remotely?
- How can I read written testimony from a committee meeting?
- What happens during conference committee meetings, and how do I watch?
- Who may I call if I have questions about the 2024 Kansas Legislature?
When will the 2024 Kansas Legislature meet?
The Kansas Legislature regularly meets for the first few months of the year. It discusses and passes laws between January and into May. Lawmakers take a few weeks off in early April so the governor has time to veto or sign bills into law.
Lawmakers then return for veto session, which is when they can attempt to override any bills the governor vetoed. Laws often go into effect on July 1.
Lawmakers participate in additional committees and commissions during the summer, fall and winter. Those committees can’t pass laws, however.
The status of each chamber is listed at the top of the Legislature’s website. If the Legislature is not in session, the date and time lawmakers will next convene is listed next to the status.
How do I find out who my lawmakers are and how to contact them?
You can look up your Kansas state senators and representatives by entering your address on openstates.org. If you already know the names of your lawmakers, you can look up their state Capitol office numbers and contact information using the Kansas Legislature’s online directory.
How do I know which bills have been filed in the 2024 Kansas Legislature?
Each bill introduced in the Kansas Legislature is assigned a number and listed in the order in which it was introduced under the Bills & Laws tab on the Legislature’s website. Bills are easily searched by bill number using the “Find Bill” drop-down search tool on the left side of the website.
How do I search for bills on a certain topic?
The Kansas Legislature’s website was recently updated to allow users to search bills by text. Sometimes, it’s just easier to Google what you’re looking for.
If the bill you are looking for isn’t appearing in search results, there are a few strategies to track it down.
Standing committees will often sponsor bills relating to that committee’s business. For example, an education committee would be most likely to sponsor bills relating to schools. Each committee’s page on the Legislature’s website lists the bills it sponsored.
But not every bill is sponsored by a committee. If you know a specific lawmaker sponsored a bill, each lawmaker’s page on the Legislature’s website lists the bills they sponsor.
If you know a bill was voted on on a specific date, you can search the journals for that day to see the activity taken by each chamber, and if the bill you are looking for was mentioned. If you know a committee heard testimony on a bill on a specific date, but you can’t remember which committee, the Legislature’s Statehouse Live archive’s calendar view lists each meeting broadcast that day.
If none of those methods helps, you can try the search bar in the upper right corner of the Legislature’s website. The search results will include every time your search term appears in a legislative document, including meeting minutes, written testimony and other bills where your search term appears, so it may take some time to parse the results.
How do I check the status of a bill?
Once a bill is introduced, it is given its own page on the Kansas Legislature’s website. As the bill moves through the Legislature, each step is documented in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent action is at the top.
The most recent entry under Bill History is the latest status that the Legislature has documented for a bill, though sometimes there is a delay in updating a bill’s status.
Some bills are also amended and the contents of it are taken out and put into another bill number. It can be hard to track how often that happens or what gets moved where.
If you want to see all bills of a specific status — for example, all the bills the governor has vetoed — you can look at the bill reports. On the Legislature’s website, under the Bills & Laws drop-down menu, you will find a link for Reports.
On that page is a grid organized by year and location. Location refers to the point where a bill might be in the legislative process.
Clicking any of the links on that grid will bring you to a list of bills that meet that criterion. Clicking Full Report will give you a bill description along with the bill number, which will link each bill back to its page.
The Bills Location Summary Report will tell you how many bills are at each point in the legislative process.
What happens during conference committee meetings, and how do I watch?
Unlike standing committees, conference committees are formed on an as-needed basis to negotiate the details of specific legislation. Each conference committee has three appointed members from each chamber — the House and Senate — who are members of the standing committees the bill was originally assigned to. Once a bill is no longer being actively considered by the Legislature, a conference committee is dissolved.
A list of active conference committees is on the legislature’s website — along with a schedule — but during busy weeks, this list changes frequently.
Unlike standing committees, conference committee meetings are less formal. No one provides testimony, there is no agenda and the only written documentation of a committee’s deliberations is the conference committee report and report brief. Meetings are also often scheduled with little advance notice and sometimes go late into the night, making them inconvenient to attend.
In conference committee meetings, lawmakers can craft legislation without the usual bureaucratic roadblocks. Conference committees are why a proposed ban on transgender student athletes made it into the final stretch of the 2022 session, and why a mystery football stadium was funded by sports wagering revenues.
Conference committees also use a tactic known as a “gut and go,” where lawmakers strip the original language from one bill and place it in another, often unrelated, bill with a different number. This makes it difficult to track a bill’s progress on the Legislature’s website.
Often, the Legislature’s only records of this “gut and go” process are recordings of the conference committee meetings. The documents from the conference committee only show the result of conference committee meetings, not the process. Conference committee reports, listed as CCRs on a bill’s page, are the proposed negotiated legislation. Conference committee report briefs, listed as CCRBs on a bill’s page, are the plain-language summary of that legislation.
The public is able to watch conference committee meetings live, though much of the substantive negotiating happens during closed-door deliberations. For those who want to watch remotely, the meetings are streamed on the Kansas Legislature’s YouTube page and the Statehouse Live portal.
What happens to a bill when it is sent to the governor?
After both chambers pass a bill, it can take up to 20 days for the governor to take action, and updates on the Kansas Legislature’s website are infrequent. But while it can seem like nothing is happening before the governor takes action, several processes are going on behind the scenes.
When both chambers of the Legislature pass a bill, that bill must be printed within 10 days in its final form — called enrolling — and signed by the chief clerk of the House of Representatives and the secretary of the Senate. The printed and signed bill is then physically delivered to the governor, who then has another 10 days to take action.
The governor can do three things once a bill is received: sign it into law; veto it, which sends it back to the Legislature for consideration of a possible override; or the governor can do nothing, in which case the bill will become law after 10 days without the governor’s support.
Can I watch a committee meeting, the House or Senate remotely?
Yes. The Legislature streams committee meetings and floor debates on its YouTube channel and through its Statehouse Live portal. The date and time of a scheduled committee meeting are listed in the Statehouse Live portal’s calendar view.
To access this page, open kslegislature.org, hover over the words “Audio/Video” in the upper right corner of the page, and select the third option on the drop-down list, “Statehouse Live & Archive.”
To access recordings of past meetings, scroll through the calendar view to the date of the meeting you are looking for.
If watching on YouTube, when a meeting is listed as “upcoming,” you may click to receive a reminder of the broadcast. If watching using Statehouse Live, click on a date on the calendar to see a full listing of that day’s scheduled statehouse events, then select the meeting you want to watch.
How can I read written testimony from a committee meeting?
Committees will publish online written testimony presented at a meeting either during or soon after the meeting takes place.
You can get to committee testimony one of two ways: through the committee’s page or through the bill’s page.
If you look through the committee’s page, start by finding the committee on the Kansas Legislature’s website. Click the link for Agendas & Minutes, then choose the date for the meeting from the drop-down menu. A list of the testimony provided during that meeting should populate below.
If you look through the bill’s page, start by finding the bill. Click the link for View Testimony and Minutes. The results should show testimony and minutes for every meeting that’s taken place for that bill.
Who may I call if I have questions about the 2024 Kansas Legislature?
If you have additional questions about the state Legislature, you can ask the state’s librarians. The State Library of Kansas has a toll-free legislative hotline that anyone can call with questions about the Kansas Legislature.
To reach the state’s reference and research librarians, call 1-800-432-3924. The hotline is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but you can also leave a message after hours and wait for a librarian’s response.
You can also email your questions to infodesk@ks.gov or chat with a librarian in real time on the state library’s website at https://kslib.info/ask.
This article was updated by Blaise Mesa for the 2024 Legislative session.
