General Statutes online now reflect 2007 enactments

As of Monday, February 25, 2008, the online database of the North Carolina General Statutes has been updated to reflect enactments made by the 2007 Regular and Extra Sessions of the General Assembly.

Anne Cole and Terry Sullivan retire

Two big retirements from the North Carolina legislative staff this month: Research Division Director Terry Sullivan and House Legislative Assistants Director Anne Cole.

Terry started as a legislative analyst in 1972, and became Research Division Director in 1979.  Anne’s first legislative employment was as Assistant Enrolling Clerk in 1963. She was back again for the 1967 session, and has been on staff continuously since 1980.

surprise: 1872-73 and 1879 laws online

Yesterday, I was doing some research for fun, and at Google typed in “Chapel Hill Iron Mountain Railroad” (the original name of the railroad opened from Chapel Hill north to just eats of Hillsborough in 1882) and found that Google had digitized the 1872-73 public and local acts as well as the Laws of 1879.

 Back in August, I posted that we had put the 770 local acts from the 1961 North Carooina General Assembly online. These local acts can be browsed in order of enactment, or searched in our session law database. The 1959 local acts have now been scanned in, and we anticipate adding them to our database in late summer. At that point, we will have 50 years of local acts and 25 years of public laws online. We were planning to stop the project of digitizing old laws, in the hope that perhaps others would have taken up that task. It looks like they have!  The old laws that Google has out up are in the public domain, I will check on the copyright law ramifications of migrating their digitized copies of those law books to our site or properly linking to them, as well as finding out how much more is out there!

UPDATE: More NC laws found online:

Private Laws of 1870-71

Laws of 1889

Streaming audio of Wright hearings online

In response to a question, today’s (Monday 2/11/2008) 11 a.m. Wright hearing by the House select committee will have an audio stream online. Click on Finance Committee Room (Rm 544) on our audio page.

2007 NC Fiscal Highlights report released

Here’s a release out today from the North Carolina General Assembly Fiscal Research Division: 

“The Highlights document summarizing fiscal and budgetary decisions made by the General Assembly in the 2007 Session has been completed and is available on the Fiscal Research Division website.  This document represents a thorough redesign of reports produced annually since 1973. Users will note several improvements that make the new publication more informative.  Most importantly, it is no longer confined to a detailed listing of changes made by the General Assembly to the general fund component of the Governor’s Recommended Budget.   Instead, it brings into view total state expenditures for which the legislature is accountable, including expenditures from non-general fund sources.