Legislative Update

Committees continued meeting primarily to move bills out of their respective committees while concurrently, the majority party in each house released their budget proposals as the week ended. The policy cut-off for bills was Friday, March 26th; the fiscal one will be the following Friday, April 2nd. Bills are stacking up for scheduling on floor calendars. Further activities will begin to focus on floor action, negotiations and compromises aiming toward an attempt to end on time on April 25th.

We reached the one-year anniversary of school closures to in-person learning this past week, and work continues to get all school buildings open once again. The ever-changing requirements and guidance for our schools keeps coming, among them being Governor Inslee’s announcement last Friday that requires all school districts to provide all K–12 students with the opportunity to receive at least two days per week of in-person learning no later than April 19. OSPI published a Q&A document that you may find helpful.

Public hearing and Executive Sessions continued this week as legislators dealt with various bills received from the opposite chamber. In fact, it appears that committees have sped up bills passing from Executive Sessions. This pattern will continue until the deadlines come and go for bills to have cleared policy (March 26th) and fiscal (April 2nd) committees.

After this Tuesday’s bill cutoff, the surviving bills switched houses and the committee hearing process started up again. This week and next week’s schedule of bill hearings are listed below. Work on the supplemental, operating, and capital budgets continues. The state’s budget outlook seems to look better each month and a third round of federal funding is on its way. But our work for stable education funding is far from over. The next major revenue forecast will be released at the March 17th meeting of the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council and the Senate and the House will release their budgets shortly thereafter. Our job is to keep telling our stories about what financial support we need from the state to educate each and every student safely.

This second half of session is just a repeat of the first half except each house is hearing the bills that passed the opposing chamber. And the process starts with committee hearings and as Milton Berle once said, “a committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”