UpClose with House Chief Clerk Norman Moore 

When House Speaker Kirk Adams banged the gavel at 3:33 p.m. on Nov. 23 and closed the fourth special session of the 49th Legislature, he also may have brought the end of the final floor session for Norman Moore.

Moore has served as chief clerk in the House of Representatives since 1992, when his predecessor Jane Richards retired. The chief clerk is responsible for supervising the bill process and floor proceedings.

That includes making sure legislation is filed properly, printed and posted online, and all legislative action is entered into the House journal.Except for a three-year absence in the early 1980s to attend law school, he has worked in the chamber since 1976.

Moore will retire at the end of the year, but he won’t be leaving the Capitol. Instead, he will begin lobbying for Isaacson & Duffy when the next regular session begins in January. Moore, known to most as Norm, is viewed by many as an institution. He spoke about his time in the House with Arizona Capitol Times shortly after the special session ended.

You started as a page. How did you end up with that job?
I got hired in the fall of 1976, after the general election. I was going to school at ASU at the time, getting my degree in political science. I was always really interested in the legislative process and, of course, politics. I started working for a couple days in the fall, and my first session was 1977.

Do you remember who was in leadership when you started?
When I got hired, the speaker was Stan Akers. But by the beginning of 1977, Frank Kelley was speaker. He was speaker for eight years. The leadership team for the Republicans didn’t change during that eight years. Burton Barr was the majority leader – well, Burton Barr was majority leader for a long time – and Jamie Sossaman was the majority whip.

What changes have you seen in this body in the last 30 years? How would you best describe the changes?
I think the biggest change is that I don’t see as much collegiality as I did when I started. I’m sure there’s a number of reasons for that, but the No. 1 reason is term limits. When I started as a page, there was some turnover every two years, but a lot of the members had been here for a long period of time, so they were able to develop personal relationships with other members. Even though they’d disagree vehemently on some issues, they’d get done with the discussion and their disagreement, and it was like, “OK, where are we going out for supper?”

What else?
Well, when you’re young and you hear about smoke-filled rooms, I never really got firsthand experience with that until I was here. In those days, members smoked in hearing rooms, members smoked on the floor, and when we were here for a long period of time, there would just be this haze. It was a real smoke-filled room.

I would say that’s got to be one of the biggest changes since 1976.
Yeah. Of course, there have been a lot of other changes in terms of technology.

What was it like handling bills before computers?
We used to print hundreds of copies of bills. Now, we actually print very few – we only start out with printing 90. When I started as chief clerk, depending on what bill it was, we printed anywhere from 750 to 1,000 copies of each bill. In those days, we used to send out some bills to be printed elsewhere.

When I started as a page, down in the basement was where the mail room and the bill room used to be. There also used to be an old printing press. They actually printed bills downstairs.

Another big change is that they used to put all the committee assignments on the bills. We didn’t use to print bills until they were first read and assigned to committees. But, not too long after I became chief clerk, they wanted to speed up the process to a certain degree, because there was a big push in the mid-1990s to try and get finished in 100 days. In order to do that, I recommended that we not wait to put committee assignments on bills.

I think most people don’t realize you’re an attorney. When you went back to Nebraska to get your law degree, what made you come back here and work for the House instead of becoming a practicing attorney?
After I got my undergraduate degree, I’d already been here a couple years as a page. This place is one where you either really like it or you don’t like it. I was one of those people that, after my first session here, I knew I wanted to come back if I was given that opportunity. With my law degree, I really thought about coming back and being on the research staff or in the rules attorney’s office.

And you did both. What committees did you handle?
When I started out, I did Banking and Insurance. My second year, I had that again. For two years, it seemed like all we did was mandatory auto-insurance revisions. I also had another committee which, at the time, was called TP&O: Tourism, Professions and Occupations. At one time that committee was actually called POT, but they decided they didn’t like that acronym, so they changed it.

How did you end up making the move to the rules attorney’s office?
Once I got back from Nebraska in 1984, Don Jansen had been in the rules office for a number of years. Don Jansen left to become the majority leader’s attorney when Don Isaacson left. Isaacson was the majority leader’s attorney when I started as a page. There was an opening available in the office, and I was asked to go into the rules attorney’s office. The rules attorney at that time was a gentleman by the name of Leland Makemson, who had been here for a long time. He worked over in the Old Capitol. (Note: Moore will be working for Isaacson, who now owns a lobbying firm.)

When you moved over to the chief clerk’s office, the previous clerk was in a similar position that you are now, having been doing the job for years and years. What was it like, knowing you were filling the shoes of someone who had been here for a long time and was really respected?
It was tough at the beginning, because any time you have to fill someone else’s shoes it’s a challenge. But I felt I had been here long enough and had enough experience in various areas that would help me.

I can’t let you leave without asking about your family’s business back in Nebraska. Tell me a little about family’s mortuary company.
My grandfather started a funeral home in a small town in southeast Nebraska in 1927. When I was young, my dad worked there. But because of health reasons, he had to choose another career and we moved to Arizona. My dad’s brother took over the funeral home in the early 1960s, and when he was getting ready to retire, there wasn’t anybody in the family who was interested in doing it.

I had been around that my entire life. At one point, when I was four or five years old, we lived in a large house in Nebraska where the house and the funeral home was all part of the same building. We used to play hide-and-go-seek in the casket room.

What kind of reaction do you get from people when they found out you used to work at a funeral home? People around here only know you as “Norm the Parliamentarian” and the overseer of House rules.
They’re all very surprised. They want to know how I did it and if there are any interesting stories I could tell. And there are many, actually.

All right, well then give me one.
I can remember one time when I went on an ambulance call with my dad.

It was in northeastern Arizona, because he still worked part-time for a funeral director when we moved to Holbrook. We went out to Heber.

There had been a car accident early in the morning. We had to pick up these two men who had passed away.

It was in the spring and it was very cold outside, below freezing. We put these two men back in the ambulance. Because it was warmer inside the ambulance, once the muscles started to relax a little bit, both of these guys started to sit up in the back of the ambulance. I about went through the front windshield. My dad was cracking up because, of course, this had happened to him before. It was like some scene from a Frankenstein movie.