NEWS

The Iowa legislative session ended for the year on Sunday evening (May 3) - 12 days after the session was scheduled to end. Legislators worked non-stop over the weekend, without sleep and with only vending machine food and whatever they could Door Dash.  They finalized all ten budget bills, compromised on a bill to cut property taxes and limit local government spending, and 38 policy bills during that time.

Legislators introduced 1,791 bills this year - that's an average of 12 per legislator or 112 per week of the legislative session.  It's a lot.  Especially considering only a fraction of them are being sent to the Governor. Historically about 11% of the bills introduced each year are signed into law.  That's one out of every 11 bills.  

The staff in the Legislative Services Bureau are busy getting all bills into their final format to be sent to the Governor (called "enrolled bills").  The Governor has 30 days from the end of session to sign bills, so she will need to take action sometime on or before June 3.  As a reminder, the Governor can sign a bill into law or veto it (which means it will not become law).  Iowa allows the Governor to pick and choose what parts of the budget are signed into law - that's called a "line item veto."  The Governor can veto lines out of a budget bill, while signing the rest into law. If the Governor does not sign a bill into law by the end of the 30-day period, the bill will automatically become law.

It will take us a few days to compile our final reports, but in the meantime, the Bill Tracker has been updated!

• You can see the bills passed by the Legislature and sent to the Governor here.
• You can ask the Governor to sign a bill you like - or veto a bill you do not like here.
• You can see the bill that did not make it through the process and will not become law here.
• Consider sending your legislators a "thank you for your service" note - and ask that they keep you on their email lists!