The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is primarily a tool for legislators and staff, but it’s also a resource for journalists. With research on over 1,400 issue areas and 45 databases of active bills, here’s what Wisconsin Legislative Council Director Anne Sappenfield and NCSL Elections and Redistricting Director Wendy Underhill told NPF Statehouse fellows.
“[The NCSL website] has an enormous amount of information,” Sappenfield said.
“There’s a leader center, there’s information for legislative staff. There’s a legislative training institute, there’s international work that’s done through NCSL. There is a Quad Caucus and a legislative network for women. And then there are always newspaper articles and just sort of what’s going on in the states or some commentary on what the hot issues are right now.”
Cover more of the money, Underhill said.
“In my view, the budget is the plan for the coming year. So, if you can understand the process by which a budget is made, you’ll know a lot about what matters to people,” she said.
Use the database of bills, they said.
“So the databases of bills are gathered through a source called State Net. …. And it has a search function, and then we have individual people who search it down to a more granular level. … It’s me looking at what bills did get enacted in the last couple of years. It’s my voice. So we are all sort of, I wouldn’t call us reporters, but we are report writers, if that makes sense.,” Underhill said.
“I think the benefit is that it’s in a way that you can digest it. So there are just so many bills and even just in one state, so much going on, and so to have a resource that puts that into categories that you can actually think about it is really the benefit that NCSL provides,” Sappenfield said.
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