Today, we’re launching an interactive database to help you track the bills and resolutions proposed by the Associated Students Senate.

Resolutions on the Table gives you easy access to data about Senate bills and resolutions to help you stay informed about discussions on the Senate floor. Our database contains several points of information including the authors, student sponsors, bill type, latest motion and voting outcome. We also break down the vote for bills and resolutions with certain motions associated with them, including the types of votes recorded.

Students can currently view the Associated Students (A.S.) Senate votes on each bill and resolution in the meeting minutes. Students can access the minutes by visiting the A.S. Senate website or by subscribing to the Senate agenda mailing list.

To view the full text of the bill or resolution, students must be subscribed to the Senate agenda mailing list. The email sends a folder every week before the Senate meeting with the evening’s agenda and the bills and resolutions for that meeting.

The A.S. Senate website has a “Bills & Resolutions” page that says “coming soon.”

According to Greg Katz, director of legislative accountability, the purpose of the “Bills & Resolutions” page is to “provide transparency to the students of UC Santa Barbara about what is going on in Senate.”

“At this time there are no plans on having a person this school year to update the website in that capacity,” Katz said. “I have decided to put my efforts into creating a new position that will handle the website in order to tackle transparency and accessibility.”

Resolutions on the Table currently shows the bills and resolutions proposed during Winter and Spring Quarter. We will update the database every Wednesday, so you can view the bills on the agenda before the Senate meeting.

Here are a few ways you can use our searchable database.

Search the name of a senator to view how many bills or resolutions they wrote and how many passed or failed. Did they pass more directional or positional resolutions? View the dates to see how long it took for a bill or resolution to pass.

These are just some ideas, but we’d also like to hear from you. What other information would you like to see about the bills and resolutions proposed? What else would you like to know about your representatives?

Let us know the comments or by shooting us an email at data@dailynexus.com.

Get the Data

If you’re interested in downloading the data we used for this project, you can access the Excel file of our database here. We’ll also publish weekly updates on that file to keep you informed on the outcome of each bill and resolution.

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