Maryland General Assembly website training

You may be here because you are frustrated with the way things are going in the State of Maryland. You want to have a say in the State’s legislation, but you don’t know where to begin or what to do.

If this is you, then you are in the right place. Learning how to use the Maryland General Assembly website, also known as MGA, is the first step. Because you need to understand what the bills are, who introduced them, how to track them, and how to submit testimony on them, in order to make a difference.

When you understand the Maryland General Assembly website, then you have the power of knowledge and action at your fingertips. You can have an impact on the outcome of legislation.

Here are just a few of the many advantages of using the MGA website.

It can help you find out who your state Senator or Delegate is so that you can contact them, know what legislative bills they have introduced, what committees they are on, track their voting records, and more.

You can find all of the bills that are being introduced into the Maryland legislative session which is 90 days long beginning in the early part of January and ending in early April.

You can review the bills in each committee in either the Senate or the House.

You can read the bills, learn who sponsored them, find out if they have a companion bill in the opposite chamber, if are they new bills this year or have they been introduced before. You can track the progress of bills as they move through the committees and chambers.

And, in the MyMGA section of the site, you can submit testimony for each bill while it is in committee. Testimony can simply be that the bill is favorable or unfavorable, and/or you may submit written testimony and/or sign up to present oral testimony at the committee hearings. You can also get status notifications of bills that you want to follow.

You can watch videos of the committee hearings to learn who said what about each bill and how they voted in real time. You can also view the hearing videos at later time.

This just scratches the surface of the valuable resources the MGA website offers.

What we recommend is while you are watching this video, open up the MGA website, on your computer, and do what the trainer has shown you in the training. Pause this video, go back, go forward. Do what you need to do to understand the sequence of each process until it is familiar to you.