In the Motor City last week the State Oversight Academy (SOA) rolled out an on-demand masterclass titled Introduction to State Legislative Oversight. The class is available on the SOA’s website and YouTube, and clocks in at just over 35 minutes.
When the SOA walked into the shop to build this new masterclass, there were already some useful tools and manuals in the garage. The SOA Wiki, the Checks and Balances in Action – Legislative Oversight across the States research, and experience building other oversight workshops helped us create something new, but still distinctly familiar for the Levin Center and informed by our team’s decades of experience in legislative oversight. If you’ve joined us for an SOA workshop before, then you probably noticed similarities with the featured content among the new state oversight examples and graphics.
When building the new state examples, we labeled each one using the avenues of state legislative oversight: analytic bureaucracies, appropriations, committees, administrative rule review, advice and consent, and monitoring contracts. To tune up the current material, we needed to use tools from all six avenues to explain how to address problems in states through legislative oversight.
Each example has three components: problem, oversight avenue, result. We searched Levin Center research, recent news, and notes from our conversations with legislative leaders across the country to find some of the best examples of legislative oversight and fact-finding work making a difference and yielding results. In the New York State Senate, for example, their Investigations and Government Operations Committee investigated and published a report on the secondary ticket market. We used the problem, oversight avenue, then results framework here. The problem is obvious to anyone who has purchased (or, in the case of the Taylor Swift show, tried to purchase) live event tickets. Hidden fees, an inability to secure a refund to postponed events, and bots outbuying regular fans at lightning speed to sell tickets at an unfair profit are just some of the recurring problems within the industry. State Senator James Skoufis, the committee chair, led a year-long investigation into these issues and published a report on the findings. This is a clear example of using the committee oversight avenue to examine a problem.
The result was Senate Bill S9461 during the 2021-2022 session, which passed unanimously and enacted several reforms including full ticket price disclosure prior to purchase, civil penalties for using ticket purchasing software, and refund policy transparency requirements in case of cancellation or postponement. This is a strong example of the committee avenue of oversight and how the tools in the committee oversight toolbox can help solve problems.
Sometimes, issues require continued monitoring after a tool is used to potentially fix a problem. The same is true with oversight, and especially emergency powers oversight. When building the advice and consent portion of the masterclass, we noticed many states recently reformed their emergency powers oversight. The pandemic resulted in many states reaffirming their oversight authority on emergency powers. Reforms limiting how long an emergency declaration may remain in force without a vote of the legislature, requiring the calling of a special session, and enforcing restrictions on curtailing rights like freedom of the press. Many of these reforms are new and untested. The SOA will be ready to monitor their use and results.
The SOA is already planning future classes. Stay tuned here for classes on juvenile justice, insurance fraud, and other topics. For now, please offer us any feedback on our first class at levincenter@wayne.edu.
