Spin Control: How to keep up with the Legislature as it faces changes, red ink and drama

The Legislature convenes Monday with the state facing a $12 billion budget shortfall over the next four years and major changes in the leadership in the executive branch of Washington government.

If that’s not enough to shake things up for lawmakers headed for Olympia this weekend, a recent poll suggests a majority of Washington residents may be more negative about the state’s future – a greater number than those who are negative about their own future, that of their community or of the nation as a whole.

Stuart Elway, one of the state’s most experienced pollsters, was at a loss to explain why 51% of the respondents to his late December poll thought things would be worse in the state – and 20% said “Much Worse” – and only about a third said better. That compared to 56% who thought things would get better for their household, 45% said things would improve for their community and 51% said things would get better for the nation.

This less than two months after only 39% of voters marked their ballot for Donald Trump, who will return to the White House on Jan. 20, and more than 55% voted for Governor-elect Bob Ferguson and most of the other Democrats who will fill the seven statewide executive positions.

Lawmakers will have 105 days from when the opening gavel comes down at noon Monday to do something about that low opinion, get rid of the red ink in the budget – unlike the federal government, the state can’t have a deficit – and get used to Ferguson after 12 years of Gov. Jay Inslee. Democratic legislative leaders, who have significant majorities in both chambers, signaled Thursday they will at least discuss taxes to cover some or all of that shortfall. Ferguson said he was ordering most agencies to find ways to cut 6% from their budgets, adding the state can’t tax its way out of budget problems.

This sets up a session that could be filled with more drama than usual, as for nearly a decade lawmakers arrived with revenue projections better than when they left the previous year. It’s drama that can be followed from the comfort of one’s own couch or desk in Eastern Washington.

All committee hearings and floor action is covered by TVW, the cable and online news operation that operates like the nation’s C-Span. The cable channel, which is 25 in Spokane’s Comcast system but might be elsewhere on other systems, covers big events live. It will show the opening ceremonies Monday, Inslee’s final State-of-the State address Tuesday and the inauguration of Ferguson and other elected or re-elected statewide officials on Wednesday. Throughout the session, it will almost always have a live broadcast from a committee hearing or floor action if one or the other is going on.

But on any given weekday, there may be as many as nine different committee hearings happening at the same time between 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. The ones that aren’t on cable television can be viewed online at TVW.org, and those that you missed because, well, most of us have lives, can be called up from the archives by entering the committee name and a date.

The Legislature’s redesigned website, leg.wa.gov, can seem a little clunky to people who were used to the old site. But it’s still the best way to keep track of legislation as it makes its way through the process.

If you know the bill’s four-digit number, you can enter it into the search engine on the home page of the site. If you know a key element of the bill but not its number you can click on “more ways to find bills” and scroll down to “Document Search” in the Advanced Ways to Search Bills section, click on that and enter information in the search section. That’s one of the things different from the old website, which had a clearer path to search .

There are options to find out what bills your legislator has sponsored, or all the bills introduced on a particular topic, like “Housing” or “Crime” or “Marijuana” – although for the last one it will tell you to go to “Cannabis,” the term the industry prefers.

As the session goes on, you can track a bill’s progress, along with reports on how it would be expected to work and what it’s projected to cost, as it goes through hearings, committee votes and floor action. Hint: If the bill gets introduced and never gets a hearing, it’s dead. If it gets a hearing but never gets out of a committee, it’s dead. If it gets out of committee but never gets a floor vote, it’s – well you get the picture. Last year, about 1,200 bills were introduced; 340 were signed, and some of those were holdovers from 2023. To paraphrase Matthew 22:14, many are culled and few are chosen.

The Legislature’s website also explains how you can sign up to testify from home on a particular bill scheduled for a committee hearing. Note that for bills with significant interest, not everyone who signs up gets to testify and those who do might be limited to a couple minutes . But that’s still better than driving across the state to testify and not getting a turn at the mic. There are also instructions of filing written testimony with the committee.

Following the Legislature day in and day out can be an exhausting experience, which is why news organizations pay reporters to do it and tell their readers or viewers about it. The number of reporters in Olympia started declining in about 2000, although in recent years the body count has gone up and so has the amount of available information.

The Spokesman-Review continues to have a full-time Capitol bureau with the hiring of reporter Mitchell Roland. The Washington State Standard has a four-person bureau for the session, with some of its reporting appearing in The Spokesman-Review and all of it available at washingtonstatestandard.com.

Other websites that carry legislative coverage during the session are Axios, Cascade PBS (part of which used to be Crosscut), the Center Square, the Washington Observer and Pluribus (which takes a more national approach to state government trends).

State funding through the Murrow School of Communications at Washington State University provides for three fellowships for experienced reporters to cover the session and provide stories that can be used for free by local TV and radio stations. (Full disclosure: I serve on a panel that helps select organizations for fellowship applicants and help keep an eye on the three reporters in Olympia.)