This report is submitted pursuant to the Virginia Register Act, §§ 9-6.15 to 9-6.22 of the Code of Virginia, § 7 (d) of Chapter 535 of the 1973 Acts of Assembly, which requires the Code Commission and the Register Committee thereof to report to the 1975 General Assembly on compilation of a "Register of Regulations" together with a statement of their activities and experience to date as well as their recommendations.

Some two years ago the Commission directed a special committee to study and report on the feasibility of some system for the betterment of public information respecting the regulations of State administrative agencies. Late in 1972 the committee report cautioned against any precipitate measure for the blanket publication of such materials because of the cost, stressed the need for some mechanism to sift and arrange or note the signigicant items in which the public would be interested, and recommended that an official and comprehensive survey should precede any final recommendation or program. For the latter purpose the adoption of the Virginia Register Act followed as the committee and the commission had recommended. Thereunder such a survey has been made, the listing of the regulations of all Virginia agencies-in what the statute names a "Register of Regulations"-has been completed, and as the Act requires the Register is hereby submitted as attached hereto. This Register illustrates what has been done and demonstrates, better than words, what the committee and the Commission recommend as a permanent progam if the requisite statutory basis and personnel and financial resources are made available therefor.

As the original committee suggested in 1972 and the Register Committee and the Commission report late in 1973, wholesale publication (sometimes called "codification") of all administrative regulations would approach the Code of Virginia itself in size and entail heavy costs for printing even without the constant updating that such programs require (as Virginia found in its abortive attempt to do so in the 1940's): Instead, the original committee suggested the · possibility, and the Register Committee and the Commission now affirmatively recommend, that an annual listing of regulations by agencies together with certain supplemental information should satisfy the greater part of the basic needs without unduly taxing the resources of the Commonwealth. (That has been the basic system in Great Britain for over 80 years.) But even this type of operation, or any other, cannot succeed without some authority to supervise it, to sort out the materials to be published or noted, and to formulate from time to time instructions for the guidance of agencies in their essential collaboration. Building on the existing Virginia Register Act, the Committee and the Commission have prepared, and there is attached hereto, the form of statute which it believes would provide a more or less permanent and in any event necessary basis. The primary problem is not that of simply whether or not to publish but rather what to publish, how to do so, in what form, and by what means. Even that is misleading because any form or degree of publication must be preceded, in actual practice, by some practicable means of procuring the. regulations, screening or selecting those to be included, etc. Moreover, there are related questions as to authentication, a central repository, inspection and copying, and frequency of publication or supplementation as well as methods of distribution.

The remainder of this ·report comments on the salient features of the system now recommended without assuming to retrace all that is said in informational detail in the reports of the Committees and Commission to the 1973 and 1974 General Assemblies. Added are matters which have been discovered in the course of making up the attached Register during the last year and half. The matters noted below from these two sources combined include (1) the minimum content of the Register and its publication, (2) the collaboration of the agencies in supplying information for it as well as the duty of agencies to keep their regulations available to public inspection and copying, (3) the definition of "regulations" and necessary exceptions, and ( 4) the requisite administrative setup for the system as well as the necessary personnel and financing therefor.