The 1263 bills you didn’t hear about

A few dozen of the 721 bills that passed the Montana Legislature this year grabbed the public’s rapt attention — hot-button social issue bills and big-dollar spending measures that prompted headlines and drew, in some cases, thousands of public comments as lawmakers wrangled over their fates.

Most of the state’s new laws, however, took far quieter paths en route to the hallowed chapters of Montana Code Annotated.

A tally of public comments produced by legislative staff, reflecting web and phone messages sent to lawmakers through the Legislature’s information services desk, indicates there were more than 127,000 individual comments on the 1,313 bills that were considered over the course of the 2021 session. The lion’s share of those comments, two-thirds, dealt with only 50 high-profile measures.