Each day when Courtney Eschbach walks into the New Hampshire State House, what lies ahead is anyone’s guess.

She might be asked to draft election procedures and simultaneously write proposed legislation to let New Hampshire residents own pet kangaroos.

“There are no two days that are the same,” Eschbach said, sitting in the State House with some of her colleagues. “It’s kind of fun to have that variety. That’s one of the things I love about the job.”

Eschbach works in the state’s Office of Legislative Services: a small group of people who research, write and perfect the language in bills proposed by lawmakers.

In New Hampshire, that’s no easy feat. Their office of 24 people – including just six other drafters like Eschbach, seven attorneys who work on legislative rules, four researchers and five support staff – processes a deluge of legislative service requests, or LSRs, every year. An LSR is a precursor to a bill: Lawmakers can file a request and describe what they’d want the piece of legislation to accomplish, even in broad terms,and then the office will research and draft it for them.

As of Dec. 17, the Office of Legislative Services had already received 1,153 requests. That number will grow once the session begins in January.

That’s a lot of legislation to manage. The group began to laugh out loud when asked about how they manage the workload.

“The best we can,” said James Vara, the new director of legislative services, who started his new position in November. “There’s certainly a balancing act of ensuring that we get them done in a period of time, and done well.”

For some in office, like Eschbach, this time of year means 60-hour work weeks, plugging away during nights and weekends to make sure the legislative process chugs along.

Her plan for the day often gets thrown out the window, Eschbach said, because she fields questions and requests from lawmakers as she works through the drafting and review process. She tends to save her heads-down work for after dinner – it’s easier to complete some tasks when her phone quiets down, she said.

All hands on deck

With all the new bill requests being filed and the looming start of the session, this is an especially busy season for the bill drafters. While there’s rarely a slow period throughout the year, this is crunch time when all hands on deck are needed.

Myla Padden runs the research department. Her team compiles data, finds examples from other states and fulfills over 1,000 research requests every session. This helps lawmakers as they consider proposing or changing state laws.

“We work with other states’ agencies and kind of whittle some of the information down so that we’re able to give the legislator some specific information on what has worked in other states [and] what might not have worked in other states,” Padden said.

In that sense, the drafters and researchers often work together throughout the process. A legislative service request doesn’t become a bona fide bill without getting at least four sets of eyes on it, Eschbach said.

Some LSRs are quick, straightforward fixes: One current request specifies “allowing a public body member’s presence at a meeting by electronic or other means of communication only if physical presence is unavoidable and providing that physical presence is necessary for voting.”

Others are more vague, like one titled “relative to the use of electronic medical records.” Lawmakers will also often make a request based on problems they hear about from constituents, and they may not know exactly what they want to fix or how to fix it. That’s where Padden’s research team comes in.

Once the legislative process begins anything can happen. The office handles anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 amendments in a given session, and passions can flare over seemingly innocuous bills.

Eschbach remembers one piece of legislation from a few years ago that aimed to make apple cider the official state beverage.

“The dairy industry got very angry about it, and so there’s a tap-dancing cow out in front of the [Legislative Office Building],” Eschbach said. “It’s a very small thing, but people get really passionate about, sometimes, really small things.”

How the sausagegets made

Once an attorney drafts the bill request, another will review it. Then, it heads to the support staff, who format it and type it up. After that, it gets a second look from another support staff member. The original attorney who drafted it will then give it a final check before it’s sent to the House of Representatives or Senate clerk’s office.

But, Vara said, the process involves much more than a draft.

“The legislator will come in, they’ll want to talk about it, they’ll want to research it,” Vara said. “It’s this full picture of an ecosystem that we’re part of, so it isn’t just typing what’s there. It is a lot of groundwork before it’s even started.”

Despite the pressures, Vara, Padden and Eschbach said the hectic days are worth it. They love their work, in all its demanding chaos.

Vara’s worked in government for a long time: as a Grafton County prosecutor, in the attorney general’s office, as an advisor to the governor on addiction and behavioral health and in the state’s Department of Justice and Liquor Commission.

“The building just keeps calling my name,” Vara said.

Staying sane

Padden, who’s worked in legislative services since the ‘80s, said she started working at the State House per diem not long out of college. She’d originally planned to be a social worker but landed here – temporarily, she’d thought at the time – to make some money and satisfy her parents, who wanted her to find a job.

“I just loved it from day one. There’s very few days when I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go there,’” Padden said. She loves working with New Hampshire’s many passionate volunteer lawmakers. “I was just amazed at the dedication and just seeing how the whole process works, but mostly walking into this building every day … It’s just special.”

Even when they love the work, they said it’s important to manage their personal lives and do things that relieve stress and make them happy.

For Padden, a Concord resident, it’s spending time with her two golden retrievers. For Eschbach, who lives in Pembroke and has worked in the office for almost 20 years, it’s singing and gardening. She grows fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers. She has chickens and beehives, too.

Vara, from Andover, said he enjoys hiking, coaching his kids’ sports teams, playing music and fishing.

“I learned a long time ago that in any of these jobs, you’d better manage these things in a way that is important to you, because you’ll get washed through the system pretty quick,” Vara said. “If I don’t play music at night, I know the next day isn’t going to be great … I’m just not in the right space. If I’m not fishing for like five days when fishing season starts in April, I’m not in a good way.”

They also like that their jobs are nonpartisan. In fact, it’s what drew Eschbach to this kind of work. She likes the chance to learn about new things and help people with the things they’re passionate about.

“You get to really see some of the fabric of the state in a way that I don’t think you would get to otherwise,” Eschbach said, political or not.

She and the other faces behind the legislation tend to go unnoticed in the public process, but all in all, they just hope more people begin to understand their work.

“I think everybody, at the end of the day, whatever their political persuasion, just wants to make sure the state runs, right?” Eschbach said. “I think that’s what it all comes back to … We’re just trying to help the people who are running the state.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, sign up for her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.