Legislative Update: Floor action and a Town Hall

We’re wrapping up the fifth week of this year’s legislative session, and we’re coming up on a big deadline – the House of Origin cutoff – next week. That means that we have until next Tuesday, February 13^th, to pass House bills and send them over to the Senate (that also means the Senate has until then to pass their bills and send them our way).

We set up these deadlines at the beginning of session to make sure we can complete our work on time, but I’m always impressed with how fast the time goes before each cutoff.

Because we have a limited amount of time left to send things over to the Senate, we’ve been on the House Floor voting on bills most of this week. At a high level, we’ve passed 70 bills so far this session. I’m particularly proud that of those, 44 have been unanimous and 60 have received strong bipartisan support. People who follow me on Facebook have heard this already, but despite what you might hear, a lot of the work we do in Olympia is bipartisan. The vast majority of the bills we pass get strong support from both sides of the aisle.

Some examples from this week include:

• Creating more flexible and affordable housing options by legalizing co-living – think small apartments with shared kitchen spaces or other similar situations – which passed unanimously. (HB 1998)
• Strengthening the Washington Physician Health Program, which provides support, early intervention, referrals for treatment, and post treatment monitoring for health professionals dealing with conditions like substance use disorder. This also passed unanimously. (HB 1972)
• Including people with lived experience on the task forces, work groups, and advisory committees working on issues affecting underrepresented populations. The “Nothing about us without us” Act will help make sure that people affected by decisions are involved in the decision-making process. It passed 83-14. (HB 1541)

I’ll have more updates about our work in my next e-Newsletter,