Up your civic engagement game in 2025: How to testify on a bill in Concord

CONCORD, NH – It’s that time of year where our newly-elected legislature has been sworn in, bills are getting written, and committee hearings will soon be starting. How can you, as a citizen, become involved in the process?

At this point, Legislative Service Requests, or LSRs, are available online. These are ideas for bills, but the language of said bills have not yet been finalized. The House and Senate have lawyers who work with the legislative bill sponsors to write the bills.

Once the prime sponsor and cosponsors of the bill agree on the finalized language, the LSR will become a bill and be assigned a bill number.

The House Speaker assigns to Committees House Bills and Senate President then assigns Senate bills Senate committees where they will be heard, and the General Court website will then have searchable “Bills Currently in Committee” to see which bills have been assigned (and not yet acted upon). For example, these are the bills in the Education Policy and Administration Committee.

As the calendar year begins, most, iif not all, bills have not yet been assigned a date to be heard in their respective committees. However, they will be soon. There are several places where the calendar will be able to be seen. One is in the bill website page itself.

For example, if you’re interested in HB50, you can just click on the bill number and it would say which date it is assigned to be heard in committee on the sidebar on the left. Some bills won’t state a hearing date yet, with HB50 being an example as it has not been assigned at the time of this article’s publishing.

Another place to see this information is in the House Calendars, which come out frequently. Once a bill is assigned to committee, it will be posted in the next House Calendar. The schedule will stay posted in the subsequent House Calendar until the date has passed for the hearing. The same is true for Senate.

Now that you know how to track a bill and see when it will be heard in committee, the next step is for you to look over which bills interest you. Follow along as the LSR turns into a bill, and gets assigned to committee. If you have any questions, you can email the bill’s prime sponsor (the first name listed) or cosponsors (all the other listed names).

Once it has a date assigned to be heard, you can do either (or all) of the following courses of action:

1. If you have an opinion on the bill, but don’t want to say anything to the committee personally, you can go online and state if you support or oppose the bill. The links to do this are not live yet. If you have any questions on how to do this, you can send an email to the representatives on the committee.

2. If you have something to say about why you feel how you do about a bill, go to the committee hearing on the day that that bill is being heard. This is the best way to get your voice heard. You can type your testimony, if you wish, and distribute it to the committee members. The clerk will also take a copy and it will go into the official record for the bill. You could print powerpoints or studies to the same effect: for distribution to committee members as well as to go into the official record. Or, you don’t have to do any of those measures and could just sign up to speak: share your story and/or opinion on the matter, which also goes into the official record. You’ll be given three minutes to say what’s on your mind, at the chair of the committee’s discretion, so share your heart, but keep it brief.

Sometimes the committee will just be hearing public testimony on a bill that day. Sometimes they will also vote on the bill that day, but sometimes the vote will be held on another date/time.

Keep in mind that if multiple bills are being heard on the same day, the committee’s schedule might “run behind” schedule, if a previous bill had a lot of people giving testimony. For example, if there was a lot of testimony being given on a bill being heard at 11 a.m., and the bill you’re interested in is scheduled to be heard at 11:30 a.m., they might be late to start on the latter bill. Or the printed time for the hearing – say, 11:30 a.m. – may not be heard at 11:30 a.m. because the Committee is still taking testimony from a prior bill. This is important to know, because you might want to schedule some “wiggle room” in your schedule if you plan to testify on a bill, just in case, especially if you have other things to do that day as well. Of if you’re on a tighttime line, you may not want to be there in person, which leads to the next possibility.

3. What if you can’t make it to the committee hearing, and you forget to vote for the bill online? Not to worry. Everyone has different schedules, and sometimes we can’t be everywhere we want to be. If you find yourself in this situation, you can just email the members of the committee that are hearing the bill, and tell them how you feel. The representatives get a LOT of emails, but most of them are marketing. They tend to prioritize individual emails from constituents, though, so they are likely to read your email. An email won’t become “official record” for the bill, but at least you’re letting your representatives know how you feel about it and what impact you think the bill might have, and that may influence how they vote on that particular bill.

That’s it! That’s all you need to do to make your opinion about a bill known to the committee. Encourage other people to do the same, so that the legislature knows what the public thinks about different legislation before they vote on it.rved as a selectman, as well as a State Representative, where she was on the Child and Family Law committee.

Candace Gibbons (formerly Candace Moulton) is a Registered Nurse of over 10 years, a mom of four, and the partner of Manchester Ink Link’s Assistant Editor, Andrew Sylvia. She loves her community and has served as a selectman, as well as a State Representative, where she was on the Child and Family Law committee.