AUGUSTA — Lawmakers approved new rules Tuesday requiring details about pending legislation to be posted at least two days before a public hearing.

The rules are aimed at improving transparency around vague placeholder bills, known as concept drafts, that are printed and released with only a bill title and, in some cases, a short, non-descriptive summary.

The disclosure rules passed the Senate 22-12, and passed unanimously in the House of Representatives without debate.

Sen. Anne Carney, D-Cape Elizabeth, said increasing the transparency around concept drafts is “a matter of importance for all of us and the public.” The proposal approved Tuesday drew bipartisan support from the rules committee, which she chaired.

“We made this a priority for this committee,” Carney said, noting the panel would meet again later in the session to consider other rule changes.

While supportive of the change, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, said lawmakers still have ways to buy more time to work on bills without using concept drafts as placeholders while details are finalized.

“I’m not willing to concede these things are necessary,” Stewart said.

Sen. Rick Bennett, R-Oxford, has led the charge against concept drafts in recent legislatures, which he said “bloom like algae in a pond.” But Bennett opposed the rule changes, saying they don’t go far enough to address concept drafts or other issues. Bennett was also upset that the rule changes don’t restrict late night committee votes.

“It brings me sadness and regret that I must vote against the pending motion,” Bennett said. “I do so as much for what is not in this order as for what’s is in it.”

Bennett said the pandemic transformed workplaces, sparking a shift to remote work, digital meetings and sharing information online. But he criticized the Legislature for reverting back to a largely paper-based system, which he said wastes resources and decreases transparency and efficiency.

He also criticized the rule changes for not addressing other issues, including reducing the voting threshold to call a constitutional convention, and addressing ways in which lawmakers have ceded more power to the executive branch, which last session would not accept a slew of spending bills enacted on the final day of the session, which is typically reserved for dealing with gubernatorial vetoes.

“This is not the time for weak tea and half measures,” Bennett said. “It is time for robust reform.”

Use of concept drafts has increased drastically in recent years, leading to concerns from lobbyists, members of the public and other lawmakers about a lack of transparency.

That’s because lawmakers could wait until the day of the public hearing, or shortly before, to unveil details of a bill, making it nearly impossible for those not involved in the drafting process, which by state law is confidential, to understand the proposal and offer meaningful feedback.

The new rules will require the bill sponsor to submit bill language to the committee of jurisdiction at least three days before a hearing or workshop, so it can be posted in the public testimony section of the online bill folder at least two days before the hearing. Failure to do so will result in the bill being killed in committee. Only the governor’s budget proposal, interstate compacts and bills modeled after laws in other states are exempt from those requirements.

An analysis by the Press Herald last spring found that lawmakers offered a record number of concept bills in the last session.

Lawmakers submitted about 250 concept bills last session, a 25% increase from the previous one and a fourfold increase from the roughly 60 concept bills submitted about 20 years ago. About 11% of all bills introduced in the previous Legislature were concept bills, compared to 5% of those introduced in the 2015-16 Legislature.

Members of the previous Legislature acknowledged the problem last year. A group met over the summer to collect ideas about possible rule changes, but could only issue recommendations for the incoming Legislature, which sets its own rules.

Carney noted that the rules committee will meet midway through the session and again at the end to see how the new rules on concept drafts have worked, as well as consider other rule changes.