Follow legislation using Texas Legislature Online (TLO)
January 23, 2023 | Montgomery County, TX
Are you interested in tracking legislation in the Texas House and Senate? You can follow bills that have been filed from their introduction to signing or veto by using Texas Legislature Online (TLO). Judging from the opening of this session, we will have to keep a close eye on legislative activities.
Here are a few tips for using TLO:
Visit https://capitol.texas.gov/Home.aspx. The site works best with the following browsers: Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari.
Set up an account by clicking on ‘Login’ in the upper right corner. You will then be taken to the login page and under the Username/Password window, you will see ‘New User’. That will take you to a page where you can create your own login.
Search for bills on the Home page by going to ‘Search Legislation’ at the top of the middle column and entering key words or a bill number, if you have one.
For instance, if you are looking for bills on ‘election integrity’, you can search those key words. If no documents are found, you can simply search for ‘elections’ and a list of bills will come up that you can review to find the bills you would like to follow.
SB indicates a Senate Bill and HB indicates a House Bill. By clicking on the bill title, such as 87(3) SB 47 - Senate Committee Report Version - Bill Text, you can view the entire text of the bill.
To the left of each bill listing, there is a small Texas logo. Click on that logo to access the bill’s History, Actions, Text or Bill List. By selecting ‘Bill List’ you can even create lists of bills that you want to track.
Visit the ‘My TLO’ link that is just to the right of the ‘Home’ button as another way to create bill lists. By going to the ‘Alerts’ feature on that page, you can sign up to receive notifications on activity occurring on bills that interest you.
Be advised, however, that it is not necessarily a good idea to select alerts for all activity on any given bill lest your email in-box be overwhelmed with notifications. Selections such as ‘Scheduled for Hearing’, ‘Reported Out of Committee’, and ‘Calendar Action’ are examples of actions you may want to track.
There are many more features on the TLO website, but these are the features you are most likely to use.
Texas Legislature Online (TLO) Handbook »