Dear friends and neighbors,
Hello from Olympia, where we’re wrapping up the second week of this year’s legislative session! Last week I was formally re-elected by my peers as Speaker of the House. I’m incredibly grateful for the confidence they’ve placed in me and for the opportunity to serve our state in this position.
As Speaker I have the privilege of giving remarks during the opening ceremonies. I talked about some of our recent successes – investing in the Housing Trust Fund, making childcare more affordable for working parents, and the new regional law enforcement training academies that have already helped train more officers. I am proud of this progress, but I know we still have a lot of work to do.
This year we’re focused on strengthening communities, creating more affordable housing, investing in education, and growing good jobs. We’re also intensely focused on our state’s budget. We’ve seen increased demand for state services, a decrease in forecasted revenue, and, like many of you, we are still feeling the impacts of inflation. We’re looking closely at every part of our state’s budget to identify savings, but like I said on opening day, we will protect the investments we’ve made to help working families. You can watch my full remarks here.
I also want to be clear, in light of some of the announcements made by the new federal administration, that we will be vigilant in protecting the people of our state. That protection is not dependent on immigration status, we have passed a number of laws in recent years that protect the undocumented members of our community and ensure their continued access to the state services they help fund. We have also advanced protections around bodily autonomy, including the right to an abortion and the right to gender affirming care. I am focused on our work at the state level, but when we need to take action to protect Washingtonians, we will do so.
|
|
This week we also kicked off our regular Democratic leadership media availabilities, weekly gatherings with the press corps down in Olympia where the leadership of the House and Senate answer questions and talk about our work that week.
I talk with reporters from the press corps relatively often, but these weekly availabilities are also broadcast for anyone to watch. You can check out this week’s here. We talked about how we’re approaching the budget this year, funding for K-12 education, the rent stabilization bill (which has already passed out of the Housing Committee), and more.