LITTLE ROCK — New and returning Arkansas lawmakers who attended orientation in Little Rock this week got their first practice with tablet computers that the legislative staff expects will reduce printing costs for House committees.
The 2013 legislative session begins Jan. 14. The House and Senate each held a pre-session orientation to acquaint new members with how the legislative process works, how legislation is drafted and what lawmakers are legally allowed to do.
The 41 new members of the House, and some returning members, complete their four-day orientation at the Capitol today. The Senate orientation was held Monday through Wednesday at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute on Petit Jean Mountain.
The Senate is also planning to purchase iPad computers to replace laptops assigned to members but has not determined when that will happen, Senate Secretary Ann Cornwell said.
The already-purchased tablets and expanded wireless Internet for public use are the latest in a series of technology upgrades in the Arkansas House over the past three years. Both steps were paid for by the House and are only for use on the House side of the building, House Chief of Staff Bill Stovall said.
Stovall said the House used $110,000 from the House operations and computerization budget to purchase 115 Dell Latitude ST Tablets and storage vaults to charge the tablets when they aren’t being used. The tablets will be used to replace lawmakers’ paper copies of bills and amendments in committee meetings.
He estimated that between less printing and less work for the staff, the tablets would save enough money in the first two years to pay for the upfront cost.
“Just the staff hours it takes to collate 20 some odd packages for each committee, every time a bill changes the bills have to be pulled out and put back in,” Stovall said. “So an exploration of the resources that were really being spent led to the conclusion quickly that we could do this more efficiently.”
Each House representative is already assigned a laptop to use during the session, which has allowed the House to stop printing hundreds of copies whenever a bill is amended, Stovall said. Once a bill has been filed, the House staff only prints a copy of bills if a member requests one, he said.
“We realized we’ve already got everything IT-ready because it’s happening out here on the floor. It’s just a matter of making it work in the committee,” he said using the initials for information technology.
Members filed 1,230 House bills in the 2011 regular session and filed an additional 1,195 amendments, House spokesman Cecillea Pond-Mayo said.
The tablets won’t be permanently assigned to lawmakers. Stovall said the tablets will be locked up when not in use. Legislators are not allowed to remove them from the room. That way, meetings won’t be impeded by members who leave the tablets at home or forget to charge them.
Stovall compared the tablets to the members’ committeeagenda packets, which contain all the documents presented or needed during a committee meeting and are kept and maintained by the Bureau of Legislative Research
During mock committee meetings held Tuesday as part of the House orientation, bureau staff member Karen Holliday told members that the tablets will be set up by the staff for each meeting.
“They stay in the committee rooms, and we’ll have them set up and ready to the correct agenda when you come in for the committee meetings,” she said.
The move to tablets will ease the work of bureau staff members who transport documents for the committee from the Multi-Agency Complex, where their offices are located, up a small hill to the Capitol, Stovall said.
The bureau has a van to “haul boxes and boxes of bills and committee agendas over here in the rain and everything else,” he said.
Stovall said the media, lobbyists and the public should still have access to paper versions of documents when they attend committees
“The press won’t notice any difference. If you do, you let me know,” Stovall said. “We have discussed it, and it is not to change.”
The tablets will not be used in committees where the House and Senate meet jointly, such as the Budget Committee, or in Senate committees yet, Stovall said.
The two chambers of the Arkansas Legislature have taken different tracks when it comes to using technology to conduct their business.
In 2010 the House installed video and audio equipment in the chamber and committee rooms so proceedings could be viewed by the public online and on television.
The $2.1 million chamber upgrades included microphones and speakers at each seat and an audio and visual recording booth in the House gallery, where the public sits. An additional $377,416 was spent to equip four committee rooms with gear to broadcast meetings. The meetings and House proceedings can be viewed online at arkansashouse.org/ house-media/videos.
The Senate does not record proceedings in the chamber or in committee rooms. Members are assigned laptops and are allowed to use computers on the Senate floor.
Incoming Senate President Pro Tempore Michael Lamoureux said the Senate Efficiency Committee has discussed purchasing iPad tablets to replace laptop computers normally given to senators.
He said the purchase is expected to reduce printing costs.
“That’s part of the hope, that it’s more efficient and everybody’s using the same thing,” he said.
Cornwell, the Senate secretary, said 38 iPads should be purchased before the end of the session.
Half of all state legislatures have tried reducing the paper they use or going completely paper-free, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They include Hawaii, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia.
“I don’t think any are completely entirely paperless,” said Pam Greenberg, who tracks legislative information-technology matters for the conference.
Greenberg said many states start trying to reduce paper usage in committees first. She said at least 18 states have pilot projects with iPads or other tablets.
“Often it’s a leadership initiative that gets it going,” Greenberg said.
She said some states have had trouble with applications or the ability to print information from the tablet but “legislators generally like using iPads and adapt to it pretty easily.
Stovall said each committee room will have a printer installed so members can print a hard copy if they prefer one.
Also new in the 2013 legislative session will be a House expansion of wireless Internet to include the chamber and public viewing gallery and House committee rooms, Stovall said.
The secretary of state provides free wireless for public use in the rotunda, but the signal is often not strong enough to extend to the chambers or committee rooms.
Stovall said the House’s technology staff felt it would cause less technology and security problems for the chamber to have it’s own wireless Internet connection. He said it should be available to the public in the coming weeks. Stovall said the one-time cost for equipment was about $47,000, which also came from the operations budget.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 12/06/2012