Judith Holliday has worked during legislative sessions at the Kansas Statehouse since 2006. A semi-retired legal secretary, she says working for the Legislature kind

Topeka ? Although Kansas lawmakers don’t officially return to work until Monday, Judith Holliday was already at her desk in the Statehouse last week, getting ready for the session.

This will be Holliday’s ninth legislative session. And although she is not an elected official and seldom draws any outside attention, she says she has gotten hooked on being around the legislative process.

“It kind of gets in your blood,” she said Friday while an IT technician was helping her resolve a computer problem. “You come down, and the camaraderie between the secretaries and the office assistants is really great. A lot of us in here know somebody from another job, and we get to know the rest of them, and it’s really good.”

Holliday is among the more than 200 temporary workers who come to the Statehouse every year and perform jobs that make the rest of the legislative process possible. They include people like her: secretaries and office assistants who answer legislators’ phones, take messages and manage the mail.

And they include staff in the document room who maintain printed copies of every bill, along with copies of every daily journal and calendar, not to mention the pair of women who coordinate the thousands of school kids who come to serve as legislative pages for a day.

“It’s fun for me because I’m kind of nosy,” Holliday said. “I like to know what’s going on, so I hear stuff as it happens. For me, it’s a way to get the news a little quicker.”

Judith Holliday has worked during legislative sessions at the Kansas Statehouse since 2006. A semi-retired legal secretary, she says working for the Legislature kind

Most of the session staff at the Statehouse are hired through Legislative Administrative Services, an agency within the legislative branch that provides support services for the Legislature.

Tom Day, director of that agency, said that outside the Statehouse, the Kansas Legislature is often the target of public criticism, and many people might wonder why anyone would sign up to work there. But he said the people who do are highly dedicated, and enjoy being part of the process.

“I think for some people, it’s just a good part-time job. A lot of them are retired from previous careers and want something to do,” Day said. “A lot of them enjoy the political process no matter how crazy it gets.”

Day also noted that some of the assistants who work during the session have been around the Statehouse longer than most of the legislators.

One of those is Joann Zlatnik, who has spent 35 years coordinating the hundreds of school kids who come each year to spend a day working as legislative pages.

“I think on the House side, we do about a thousand a year,” she said. “We used to get them out the wazoo, but now with the computers it’s totally different.

“It used to be, you had to get them because that was a big deal,” she said, “because they got the mail, they got everything. But now everything’s on computer, so really they don’t have much to do except run around the building, and they go to committee meetings.”

“It’s educational and they get to learn about the government,” said Linda Wulfkuhle, the Senate page coordinator who hasn’t been around quite as long as Zlatnik.

But Zlatnik said it’s not uncommon, if you travel anywhere in Kansas, to stop into a restaurant or diner and see a photograph that the waiter or waitress had taken, posing with the governor, when they were young and spent a day working as a page in the Legislature.

Another group of seasonal workers are the official Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate, whose jobs involve much more than answering phones or herding school children around the building.

“We produce the daily journal and the daily calendar,” said Senate Secretary Corey Carnahan, who supervises a staff of nine to 11 employees during the session. “We take action on software to put information out on the website, and we serve a variety of administrative duties in the chamber such as incorporate amendments, prepare new versions of bills, and prepare bills that go to the governor.”

Unlike the office assistants and other administrative staff, the Secretary’s and Clerk’s staff have to work the same hours as the legislators themselves, and sometimes even longer, which means they frequently have to work late into the night — sometimes into the next morning — making official record of everything that happens in the chamber.

“That’s been part of the process forever, so we don’t give a lot of thought about the extra hours,” he said. “We focus on making sure the information is accurate. Our people have a great attitude about it. We want to get the work done quickly and accurately.”

Those jobs will get underway in earnest Monday morning, when lawmakers reconvene for the start of the 2016 session.