Admin Rules Review

Hi there, I'm Marci Burks, an attorney with the Bureau of Legislative Research's Code of Arkansas Rules team.

This video is meant to give you an overview about the process and what you can expect as we work with you on codifying your agency rules and adding them to the Code of Arkansas Rules so that you kind of know what will be asked of you, what the process looks like, and the things we might send your way and what you should do with them.

So the first step in the process is reaching out to a rule-making agency, your agency, and asking for final versions of the rules. At that point, we check out Secretary of State records to see what the final rule is that they have on file and that way we know we're all on the same page that we're codifying the final rule for the agency. If any issues or questions come up at that point, someone from the team will reach out, but otherwise you may not hear from us for a while as we begin working through the codification process. What that looks like from our perspective is that each rule has an attorney and an editor who are assigned to the rule and they go through two rounds of the codification process in editing. Once those two rounds are completed for both attorney and editor, then the rule goes to executive review portion of our process, and then finally a temperature check where we read through all of the edits and all the changes that were made to verify they're all there and represented. At that point, once we've gotten to that point in the process, it's time for rule review by the agency.

There are three documents that you are likely to get sent to you as part of that process. The first one is what we call the tracked changes, or TC BLR Final, and it will look like this. It's the final version of your rule, only with tracked changes and all of the edits shown so that you know exactly what we did and what changes were made, from the formatting, textual edits, combined with Code of Arkansas Rules style. There's nothing that you won't be able to see represented there in the document. Then you might also notice that there may be comments in the document that indicate you should check out note 1. That note 1 is in a companion document called the Notes to Rulemaking Entity Document, and it's going to look like this. It will include questions, notes, and possible corrections referred to as APA corrections that the agency may want to consider making. Questions are things that we need answers to if something's not clear, or we need confirmation from you and the agency. Notes are largely contextual or give you some background that you or the agency made the change that we did or how we approached a section, per se. Then APA corrections are possible changes that need to be made through promulgation that we identified through staff that there were substantive and unclear that go beyond our authority in codification. Just to be clear, these are not mandatory changes or corrections that have to be made, just things that have come up in the process we made a note of. We can't change it. The agency may want to consider it, but it's not mandatory. It's in the agency's discretion whether to promulgate or not. So notes and corrections do not need agency response on, however for questions we do need agency response. So responses are just put here in the document, and then we ask that you would save it by adding "RE", because you're the rule-making entity, and "Review" to the beginning of the filename, save it. That way you can send it back to us.

There's another document that you may also end up sharing with us, or sending back, and that's the Clean BLR Final Draft. This is the same document, your rule, but with all edits removed so you can see what your rule looks like in codified format. As you're reviewing, if you come across anything, any issues or any concerns that you have or questions about why it was codified the way that it is, you can make edits using Track Changes and you can also leave a Comment for us, so that we can see or understand what your perspective is. And then same thing on this, we would just ask that you get "RE Review" added to the filename so you can submit back to us. So if you did have comments or questions, you would save and rename this document to "RE Review", then if there were any questions that needed responses we would do the same for the Notes document. At that point, you would send them back to the attorney that you're coordinating with or the other team member that's working with you on that rule.

There may be times where you don't have issues or comments that you need to send back in terms of a new version or there may not be any questions that need responses. In that case, just let us know that version looks good to you and we can move forward in the process. If there are revisions that need to be made, we'll review those, make updates as appropriate, and go through the process with you again, sending you a revised version until we both get on the same page of this as our final codified draft. At that point, we would send you a clean version of the final, along with a form for your agency had to sign off on that says the agency has reviewed this rule, this represents the codified version of our rule, and it's ready to be added to the Code of Arkansas Rules.

So that's the process in a nutshell. After that point, we would work on moving forward with other agency rules that you might have, or if that completes all the rules for your agency, then we would go and move to working through the process with additional partners. So that is what you can expect in terms of Code of Arkansas Rules codification project. We know that agencies are busy, that know that there's a lot on your plates, we want to be mindful of that and make good use of your time, and we also want you to know we appreciate you and the work that you are doing and we look forward to helping create the Code of Arkansas Rules with you. We hope you know that you can always reach out to anyone on the team if you have any questions, concerns, or anything we can help you out with. We look forward to working with you.