How you can keep tabs on the legislature

How you can keep tabs on the legislature

The 2025 Legislature is officially in session! There is a lot to keep tabs on and it can get overwhelming. However you can easily track lawmakers, legislation and even lookup how much money special interests are donating to lawmakers.

Last year we devoted a full hour-long webinar to the topic which you can watch HERE.

But here are also some quick tips to get started.

Do you know who your legislator is?

If you don’t, just go to this link and enter your address and it will tell you who your representatives are in the state senate and house.

Do you have a free account setup yet at le.utah.gov?

You really should if you don’t! Go to this link to setup your free account. Why? Because with an account you can do things like track legislation and get emailed updates when a bill you are following advances through the legislature.

You can search for bills different ways

You can search by bill number or by the lawmaker sponsoring it. You can also go to this link and just do a simple keyword search for bills about topics you are interested in.

Make sure to track those bills!

When you find legislation you are interested in just look to the right side of the page and you will see a button to track the legislation.

Then in your legislative account you can select to receive email updates about the bill’s progress if you want.

Use the calendar to keep track of committee hearings

On the legislature’s homepage you can scroll down to the calendar, select a day and then see what committees are meeting.

Clicking on a committee will take you to a page where you can view or listen to the committee hearing live from home or listen to hearings of old committees. You can even address the committee remotely as well if you want to comment on proposed legislation.

Don’t forget to look up campaign cash!

It’s a different website, but if you head over to disclosures.utah.gov you can easily search campaign finance records for lawmakers and other public officials like the governor and the attorney general.

The public search will autofill for you if you start to enter a lawmaker’s name. When you find the right one the page will show you their campaign records by year.

Clicking on “CSV Download of Filed Reports” will allow you to download a spreadsheet of campaign donations and expenditures for the elected official.

You can also click on “Conflict of interest” under “Filed Documents” to see what conflicts the lawmaker has disclosed that could potentially influence their actions as a public official.

To learn more about analyzing campaign finance spreadsheets and comparing it to legislation proposed on the hill, check out our 2024 webinar HERE.

If you enjoyed this resource and would like to support more open government training like it, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Utah Investigative Journalism Project by visiting utahinvestigative.org/donate.

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