Technical Corrections Day Canceled Thanks To Bill
June 17, 2023
Indiana lawmakers won’t return to the Statehouse this summer to fix small errors in legislation thanks to a bi-partisan measure that eliminated the need for Technical Corrections Day.
Technical sessions are typically used to correct small errors, like grammar, or resolve technical conflicts between pieces of recently passed legislation. Senate Bill 80, signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb in May, will allow lawmakers to make the corrections during the next Indiana General Assembly session.
“Senate Bill 80 is the best bill this committee and probably the General Assembly will consider this year because there is nothing substantive in the law that we are changing,” Sen. Aaron Freeman, R-Indianapolis, said while introducing the bill in January.
For the past five years, various Senators have authored legislation like SB 80 as a way to “alleviate those technical corrections” in bills passed during the legislative session that would otherwise be resolved during Technical Corrections Day, said Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis.
Although lawmakers did not design SB 80 to replace the technical session, Taylor said, “it just so happened that this year, unlike other years, the technical corrections that we made in SB 80 covered everything.”
“In deciding whether to hold a Technical Session Day this year, the President Pro Tempore and Speaker – with review and advice from their staffs and the Legislative Services Agency – determined there were no technical errors and/or conflicts discovered in bills requiring immediate action,” Molly Fishell, communications director for the Indiana Senate, said.
A typical Technical Corrections Day would go something like this:
“There’s a committee that’s established, that committee would get a list of changes and explanations that were suggested from the Legislative Services Agency (LSA), and the LSA would present the legislation and say ‘This is the technical correction for this bill,’” Taylor said.
After the LSA provided the list of corrections, the committee would go through the corrections, vote on them and send them to the full body for approval, said Taylor.
Sen. Freeman, Taylor, and Lonnie Randolph, D-East Chicago, authored SB 80. It passed with unanimous bipartisan support.
