The 2013 legislative session is just a week and a half away, so time to get ready.

You might want to try browsing through this list of reports submitted to the legislature for the upcoming session.

It includes an incredible range of materials, from the annual report of the State Ombudsman or the University of Hawaii’s annual salary report, to little things like the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ report on their use of “electric guns” (hint: DLNR doesn’t have any yet, although they were authorized last year).

You can also access departmental testimony submitted for the budget briefings already underway before the House Finance and Senate Ways & Means committees.

And notice that the legislative website has been updated and now includes additional types of searches that previously were available through the capitol’s internal computer system but weren’t set up for public access. For example, you can now search for bills introduced by any legislator, including those for which they are the primary sponsor or those they signed as co-sponsors, and can directly track bills as they meet internal House and Senate calendar deadlines for lateral movements between committees. Previously, the capitol website allowed you to find bills that met crossover deadlines, but not those that cleared those internal lateral deadlines. So this is a big improvement and appears to finally give the public access to the same bill tracking tools previously available to legislative staff.