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Floor debate time

In a typical 45-day General Session, each chamber of the Utah Legislature schedules roughly 100-120 hours of floor debate time. Not all this time actually gets used. I do not tally time spent in committee here, only time spent on the House or Senate floor.

About the data

I wrote a program that scrapes bookmarks from archived House and Senate floor videos. These bookmarks allow viewers to jump to discussion of a particular bill. This method means that time "considering" a particular time includes not only time debating that bill, but also time voting on it or addressing other motions relevant to it, such as motions to circle or amend a bill. Recognize that a typical House or Senate floor vote takes about 2 minutes, so deduct that from time "considering" a particular bill if you want an estimate of how long the bill was actually debated.

Even when the Utah House or Utah Senate is on the floor, legislators are often engage in activities other than consideration of bills: Waiting for legislators to sit and come to order (the biggest single use of non-bill time), recesses/saunters (i.e. breaks), recognizing visitors to the capitol, hearing from the governor or from Utah's representatives in Congress, and so on.

Floor time per week

Both chambers spend more time on the floor late in the session. Two reasons: (1) Many bills get introduced late the session, making it impossible to consider them earlier (details), and (2) bills need to get through committee before they come to the floor.

Here is floor time (in each chamber) per week in the most recent General Session:

And here is the same chart going back several years:

Floor time per bill

Only a handful of bills receive more than passing attention on the floor. This chart depicts a separate vertical line for each bill considered in the most recent General Session, with enacted bills at left and failed bills at right. Bills are sorted by how much floor consideration they received.

Most years, the median enacted bill receives 10-15 minutes of total floor consideration (adding across both chambers). If we assume that 2 minutes of that "consideration" went to House voting, and 2 minutes went to each of the Senate votes (the Senate votes twice on each bill), then deducting 6 total minutes of voting time from the 10-15 minute median implies only 4-9 minutes of actual debate—total, across both chambers—for the median bill. In other words, the median enacted bill receives something like 2-4 minutes of discussion in the House, and 2-4 minutes of cursory discussion in the Senate, before passing.

In the most recent General Session (2024), these bills received the most total floor consideration (combining House and Senate):

Bill Total floor consideration (minutes) Enacted?
HB0261S04 138 yes
SB0224S02 90 yes
HB0257S05 88 yes
SB0161S06 74 yes
HB0562S02 66 yes
HB0068S02 65 yes
HB0029S02 65 yes
SB0057S03 64 yes
HB0078S02 61 yes
SB0233S03 55 yes

More bills means less time per bill

In years when legislators pass more bills, they spend less time discussing each bill before passing it.

Non-bill floor time in 2024

As noted above, these charts rely on bookmarked tags in the Legislature's archived floor videos. These tags are written by staff. Since the tags are not always written the same way, it gets difficult to aggregate all these tags to identify the main uses of non-bill time. For example, here are the tags that had the most time attached to them in the most recent session, 2024:

Description Total floor time (minutes) As % of all non-bill time
Standing Committee Reports 431 17%
Prayer, Pledge, Quorum 232 9%
Communications 198 8%
Rules Committee Report 181 7%
Communications from the Senate 165 6%
Saunter 155 6%
Announcements 139 5%
Introduction of Bills 130 5%
Personal Privilege 121 5%
Call to Order 37 1%
Recording 1 29 1%
Conference Committee Report 28 1%
Motion to Suspend Rules, to Allow Rep Snider another 5 mintues., Wilcox 26 1%
Opening Remarks-President Adams 26 1%
Chief Justice Matthew Durrant 25 1%
Remarks by Speaker Shultz 20 1%
Recording 2 18 1%
Communications from the Governor 17 1%
Personal Privilege Rep Albrecht 15 1%
Personal Privilege Rep Clancy 14 1%

Much non-bill time is spent waiting for people to sit down. This time is generally tagged as "Recording 1," "Recording 2," and so on—these tags indicate that the cameras were turned on at the scheduled start of floor time (or perhaps a few minutes early), but nothing has happened yet. Within each chamber, each day starts with "Recording 1," but moves to "Recording 2" (or higher) if the cameras were turned off for a break. By using wildcard searches for things like %Recording%, %Prayer%, %Recognition%, etc, we can get a better sense for how much time was spent in common non-bill activities in 2024: