session—legislators, their families, lobbyists, journalists, staff members and lookers-on.

session—legislators, their families, lobbyists, journalists, staff members and lookers-on. The legislature this year will be making decisions on more than 1,200 pieces of legislation, 444 of them carried over from the 1980 session. Almost 800 new bills, resolutions and joint resolutions have been prefiled for introduction in the 1981 session.

The heavy workload for the so-called “short session”—scheduled to last a minimum of 30 days on oddnumbered years—has drawn waves of criticism from legislators who maintain that the short sessions, introduced only in a 1971 revision of the state constitution, were intended to deal strictly with adjustments to the state’s biennial budget, emergency measures and carryover items from “long sessions” in the even-numbered years, which run a minimum of 60 days.

The constant swelling in the size of the state’s yearly workload has been reflected in the growth of support personnel and in the Capitol Police, which employed only 12 men 20 years ago but now have SO, all of whom work year round as committees and commissions continue meeting between sessions.

The volume of work has forced the legislature’s division of legislative services, which drafts all pieces of legislation, to work evenings and weekends in recent weeks to keep up with the requests for bills from senators and delegates.

“We’ve just been swamped,” said Penny Smithers, an assistant to legislative services’ fiscal officer Ben Reese, “but we’re doing well in keeping up.”

For legislative services, the busy days of initial drafting of bills should come to a close by Jan. 19, the date legislators were expected to choose as a cutoff for introduction

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