March 4-8, 2024
They did it! The legislature adjourned Sine Die during the daylight on March 7th. This was after a week of going through a lot of bills on the concurrence calendar, confirming many gubernatorial appointments, honoring legislators who will not be back next session (including Senate majority leader Andy Billig), and passing the transportation, capital, and operating budgets!
Regarding the operating budget, the House and Senate budget writers released their agreed-upon budget on the 6th after many long days and nights of negotiations. And on the afternoon of the 7th, it was passed by both the House and the Senate. If you are interested in looking at the budget, visit leap.wa.gov. Under current budgets, click on Senate and look at the information under the Conference Committee (3/6/24).
So, what’s next?! A lot of bills have either been or soon will be delivered to the Governor. And as discussed previously, at this point in the process, he has 20 days from the bill being delivered to take action. Visit the Governor’s website to see what bills are up for action. Bill action can be watched on TVW.
While it is hard work to get a bill passed and signed by the Governor, it is generally not as hard as it is to implement the bill as intended! The state agencies will be getting a lot of new directives from the legislature, in the form of policy bills, budget provisos, or both. That means it can take time for changes to go into effect, and it’s important to not lose sight of the bill/budget item as implementation gets underway. In other words, keep an eye on the things you care about!
This will be the last update unless anything of great significance happens as the Governor takes action on bills, including the budget. Thank you for your involvement this session. A lot happened in a short period of time, and in many areas, positive investments were made for children, youth, and families.
Many thanks to Erica Hallock for doing the weekly tracker and budget documents (and more!) and to Jen Kitajo for getting the weekly updates and tracker out… week after week!
Here is the P4C week nine bill tracker 2024.
And here is a chart highlighting some of the items we were involved with: Budget highlights
Questions? Contact laurielippold@gmail.com
