Published date: February 5, 2024
Policy Cutoff Ends the Path to Passage for Many Bills
February 5 th is the fiscal committee cutoff, and the next day the Legislature will move full time to floor action until February 13 th , the deadline for each chamber to consider their own bills. Then, the House and Senate committees will have a week to consider each other’s bills.
Why does this matter: The path for a bill to pass the Legislature gets smaller at each deadline. Only a few hundred bills will survive, and we are tracking a handful of those. Of the 89 bills on the APWA tracking list, only 32 are still viable at this writing – the others were either enacted last year or failed the policy committee deadline of January 31 st . Of those 32 some are budget
bills that are exempt from the bills deadlines or are bill that are already in their respective Rules Committee, awaiting floor action (13 bills). The remainder are currently in fiscal committees, like the transportation committees, and the budget committees. After the February 5 th deadline, many of those remaining bills will “die”. The list below are the ones currently scheduled for a fiscal committee vote. Thus, the tracking list may be reduced substantially by Tuesday morning.
Budgets: The fiscal forecast is scheduled to be released on February 14 th , and each chamber will release their budgets thereafter. The capital and transportation budgets are mostly written at this point as the budget writers do not expect they will have to make major changes due to the forecast.
Regarding Climate Commitment Act (CCA) spending, Legislators have been told to submit requests over $5 million to their leadership. Whether this spending will have null & void clauses attached due to I-2117, the CCA repeal initiative, is unknown.
Deeper dive: TVW’s Legislative review can be found here https://tvw.org/shows/legislative-review/
Each day, they provide a concise wrap up of the major legislative news of the day.
Current fiscal committee schedules for APWA tracked bills:
Ways & Means (Senate) – SHR 4 and Virtual JACB – 2/5 @ 10:00am
SB 5770 – Exec Session – Providing state and local property tax reform.
Transportation (House) – HHR B and Virtual JLOB – 2/5 @ 10:30am
HB 1989 – Exec Session – Creating a graffiti abatement and reduction program.
Transportation (Senate) – SHR 1 and Virtual J.A. Cherberg – 2/5 @ 1:30pm
SB 6115 – Exec Session – Concerning speed safety camera systems.
SB 6277 – Exec Session – Creating a new statutory framework for the use of public-private partnerships for transportation projects.
SB 5959 – Exec Session – Concerning automated traffic safety cameras.
SB 6302 – Exec Session – Creating a Washington state supply chain competitiveness infrastructure program.