HELENA — If you’ve followed the Montana Legislature at all over the last 20 years, chances are you recognize LAWS — the familiar bill-tracking system with its golden yellow background — which the public has been using to keep tabs on legislation.
Now, with the 2025 legislative session approaching, that system is changing.
“The old website, it worked really well,” said Jerry Howe, executive director of the state Legislative Services Division. “It served a lot of people for a lot of years. The unfortunate reality was the infrastructure upon which that website was built was beginning to fail, and we couldn't risk a catastrophic failure of the entire website during a legislative session.”
Howe said his staff has been working for about ten months on implementing a new legislative website, at legmt.gov. He said the goal is to make sure the site both encourages public participation and helps the legislators with the work they need to do.
Besides a completely different look and feel, the new site comes with features like an updated calendar of events, a new system for public comments and more tools for lawmakers.
One of the biggest changes for the public will be the switch from LAWS to Bill Explorer, a new system for looking up legislation. It includes a redesigned search system, and users can filter through bills from sessions as far back as 1999.
Leaders are also planning to launch a feature that will allow users to subscribe to alerts on specific bills they’re interested in.
Howe said it’s taken a lot of work in a short time for staff to get all the information into the new database. He said some people have contacted them about issues with the new site, particularly Bill Explorer.
“We struggled in the beginning with being able to collect histories, going back for multiple sessions,” he said. “All of that, all of those issues have been resolved.”
If you see any issues with the new site, Howe encourages you to let them know. You can use this form, also found at the bottom of the legislative website, to contact the webmaster.
Howe says they understand the changes are going to take some getting used to. He suggested people may want to start familiarizing themselves with the website before the session begins.
“As we work through some of the bugs and the issues that are common in a project of this magnitude, we're confident that it will work well and people will come to appreciate it,” he said.
