The Bill Tracker System in the Utah Legislature Is Not Working Rhett Wilkinson Follow Mar 9 · 2 min read

Staff didn’t return a citizen call about the issue

My Legislature, the system to track bills in the Utah legislature, is not working.

Someone presumably paid by the legislature to work on the tracker system, who was referred to by a staff member in the legislature who didn’t know how to help me, did not return my citizen call asking for help with the tracker system. (In the voicemail, I say that the system isn’t working.)

To say the least, this is disappointing. Anyone interested should be able to track how their lives are being influenced.

Some of the bills on My Legislature that have moved through the Utah legislature, though My Legislature didn’t provide any (email???) notifications??? about their activity as is supposed to happen. (photo credit: le.utah.gov)

You can click a “Track this” button for any bill. The problem is that you’re supposed to get email notifications, as legislative staff said, for any activity to a bill you track. I’m following 13 bills and at least 10 have seen activity. (All activity should be followed, but at least seven have seen relatively significant activity.)

I’m able to see that bills have made activity by looking on the My Legislature webpage, but that doesn’t account for the email notifications I should have been getting.

I’ve been logged into My Legislature since I started following the first bill I’ve been following, so it should have been working.

Why doesn’t My Legislature work? Why didn’t the person who works on the tracker system return my call? (And you’d hope they would call me back even as press, but I indeed called as a citizen.) Is someone, or many people, trying to keep in the dark the actions of the legislature?

Perhaps, tragically, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Forty-two of the 104 members of the legislature got Fs for “good government” in Alliance for a Better Utah’s “Legislative Scorecard.” The good government category had to do with just two pillars: transparency and responsiveness.

And I can speak more to the responsiveness. When I have messaged legislators about some bills this session, I have heard back only sparingly.

The legislature is still in session as of the publication of this article. Will they make things right?

Tragically, they probably won’t. Hopefully, there is a law hanging over their heads on this one, where they have to have a system like this (it wouldn’t be this system exactly, would it?) running.