JANUARY 27, 2023
| We are going to sound like a ‘broken record’ because once again we have to say: Where did the week go? There is general agreement, however, that while each week goes by extremely fast, looking back to Monday of this week (or even yesterday) seems like ages ago. A lot happens during the course of the week; hearings, meetings, more bills to review, lobby days, and impromptu hallway conversations about amendments. Speaking of amendments, committee chairs are starting to schedule more bills for executive action; many of which will be amended. While the weekly tracker will include amendments for some of the bills, it will not include amendments for all of them. For that, your best bet is to go to leg.wa.gov and on the bill history, click on committee materials. From there you should be able to click on amendments and see what was proposed, what passed and what failed. There will also be hyperlinks to all the committee materials on our P4C weekly bill tracker. If you are looking for a bill on leg.wa.gov, and it now has an S (as in SHB or SSB) included, that means the bill has been amended. It might be amended again further down the road, and would then be 2SSB or SSHB, or a similar designation. Bills can go through many changes as they move through the process. It’s possible a bill that didn’t make it out of committee prior to the cut-off could be amended onto a bill that did. When talking about this strategy, advocates often say “Is there another bill you can hang it on to?” When they are trying to keep it alive, they could find a number of creative ways to do so. Although there are still 3 weeks until the first cut-off (bills have to be out of their original committee by Feb. 17th), we are at the point in session where if a bill hasn’t been introduced its chances of being heard and passed begin to dwindle. While it can happen, it’s likely that a bill heard the sixth week won’t come up for a vote. There isn’t a hard and fast rule about that and in most cases proponents of the bill will push for not only a hearing, but for the bill’s passage out of committee. Now for the weekly reminder that if you want to catch up on hearings, go to TVW ! They record and archive all of the hearings – a great service for folks who may not be available to attend a hearing in real time but want to know what happened. Just go online, find TVW and go from there! And again, if you want to look at amendments that have been submitted, go to the bill on leg.wa.gov and click on committee materials! Hope this helps. You can find the new bills, and updates on previous weeks bills here: P4C weekly bill tracker week three. Thanks all! Have a good week and let us know if you have any questions. Laurie Lippold, State Policy DirectorJarel Sanders, Policy Associate |
