LOCAL
AND
UCONTESTED
(yes, you read that right: BOTH)




Live Blogging With Mary Sue Krantzenburg, former chief deputy clerk for Senate Administration Committee:

LAU.COM: Did you have an overriding philosophy that guided you when managing the Local and Uncontested Calendar?

MSK: I had a three-pronged test that I think served the Local and Uncontested Calendar well.

First, I would ensure that a committee had certified a bill to be eligible for Local and Uncontested. That's really important.

Second, I would demand that a committee printing existed and had laid out for at least 48 hours.

And finally, I would notify the Chairman if ANY Senator wanted to bump a bill off Local and Uncontested. The average citizen thinks it takes two votes to bump a Local and Uncontested bill off the calendar. But of course, tradition dictates that the Administration Chairman will always be the second vote.

LAU.COM: Wow! That seems like an awful lot of balls to have up in the air at one time.

MSK:  (laugh) Well, I would never recommend that anyone try to  do the job more than a session or two in a row. But despite the grueling hours, constant pressure from the Lieutenant Governor's office and the sheer volume of paper I had to deal with -- I knew someone had to do it, and I was happy to step up to the plate.

LAU.COM: Who types out the script that the pretend Lieutenant Governor speed-reads during Local and Uncontested debate?

MSK: In my day, I set up the basic framework. Then an intern from the Enrolling and Engrossing office would actually enter all the verbiage into a word processer. I would review it, have the parliamentarian's assistant review  it-- sometimes Betty King would actually give it a final look-over. There are never too many sets of eyeballs when in comes to the Local and Uncontested Calendar!! (laugh)

LAU.COM:  How should we deal the lag time on the production of revised actuarial impact statements?

MSK:  The classic chicken-or-the-egg debate! (laugh)
 
I think that, instead of trying to set up a whole new apparatus, we should  keep it in the LBB's domain and let those folks partake of the necessary input from ERS. TRS, the Comptroller of Public Accounts or whomever. 

I've always been skeptical of plans to build a new church just for Easter Sunday, and I try to see both the forest and the trees. Local and Uncontest, like life its ownself, is a giant balancing act.

NEWS NOTE: Star-Telegram Believes In Tooth Fairy, Senate Local And Consent Calendar (editor's note: there may be a tooth fairy, but there damn sure isn't a "consent" calendar in the Senate.)

Loyal readers will probably think this is an April Fool's Joke, but it's an actual article from Sunday's Startle-Gram. It would be funny if it weren't so damn sad.

"Tarrant tag team

Veteran state Sen. Chris Harris, the blunt and cantankerous Arlington Republican, has been replaced as chairman of the powerful Senate Administration Committee by Fort Worth's Kim Brimer, a relative newcomer to the upper chamber.

Harris, the Senate's fifth-most-senior member with 15 years in office, has had a sometimes stormy relationship with Lt. Gov. DavidDewhurst, who presides over the chamber and makes the committee assignments.

As chairman of the administration committee, Harris was in charge of the Senate's purse strings and could set what is called the "local and consent calendar," a fast track for noncontroversial legislation that assures swift passage.

Last year, however, Harris slipped in a couple of not-so-noncontroversial bills on the local calendar and apologized after someone found out about it. At the time, he said it was an innocent mistake and offered to resign his chairmanship, but the lite guv and Harris' colleagues asked him to stay on.

That vote of confidence, however, was absent when Dewhurst made this year's committee assignments."