Why is it so hard to find bills online?
One of the major "online sunshine" headaches for Dome — as well as state political bloggers — is the difficult of finding legislation on the state Web site.
For example, this morning we linked to a story about how water bills became private in 2001. We wanted to add a link to the bill that made them private.
The N.C. Legislature Web site allows you to search for old legislation by year and keyword, but that can be a frustrating and time-consuming process.
Type in "utilities" for the 2001 session and you get 135 bills, arranged in no apparent order. Narrow it down to ratified bills and you still have 59. The bill appears to be this one, but it would have been a lot easier to find by searching for the sponsor — an option that is not available for older bills.
But don't just take our word for it. Progressive blogger James Protzman says he has the same problem.
"It's important to draw a distinction between simply having information available and having information that's understandable and easy to use," he writes.
Blog RSS feed
