Virginia legislators, legislative staff and political junkies all use the same system to learn about when a new bill drops, gets a hearing or gets voted on. It’s about to get its first major overhaul since its inception 30 years ago.
The first thing you’ll notice on Virginia’s new Legislative Information System, or LIS, is the color. It’s been tan and red for years; now, it’s blue and white.
“We looked at some studies and found it was easiest on the eyes,” said Dave Burhop, director of the Division of Legislative Automated Systems.
He and Diane Seaborn, a manager at DLAS, said the independent agency that supports the House, Senate and other commission work has spent the last five years creating the new system after getting the okay from the legislature.
Top concerns were security and function improvements. And while LIS had some superficial improvements over the years, it’s basically stayed the same since it was first introduced in 1994.
Seaborn was around back then, and she said tracking bills before LIS was a nightmare.
“Manual processes, very, very late nights, matrix printers, you know," she said. "It was crazy.”
The new system is considered a major overhaul. Much of the improvements make things easier for clerks and legislative staff to help move things through the process, but there’s improvements for users, too: a more robust and visible search bar, a calendar feed on the home page and more watch lists that can hold more bills.
It also runs quicker on both regular computers and mobile devices. And while the old LIS was housed and maintained off-campus by contractors, the new system is run and hosted entirely in-house.
Still, don’t expect too much user shock when you first log in.
“We wanted to stick to the look and feel of the previous system because a lot of people really liked it,” Burhop says.
The new LIS launches Monday September 23rd. Its first real stress test — another issue after years of crashes due to too many users — will likely be shortly before the next legislative session starts in January 2025.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
