Legislative Action Committee Update
The legislative session in Olympia starts on Monday Jan. 12. All pre-filed bills have been moved into their initial status as "Introduced." Over 80 committee meetings are scheduled for the upcoming week, where they will update any process changes, conduct work sessions, and hear bills scheduled for Public Hearing - this is where you can get involved.
The CCRP Legislative committee will help you track bill numbers as we meet each Monday in January, 7 pm in-person at the HQ and online. [zoom link]
Here's the short list of how you can get involved, with increasing levels of engagement for bills that we will eventually follow:
- Committee sign-in / Register position (pro or con) - You can simply register a vote for or against. This is the least effort required, and can be done up until 1 hour before the committee start time.
- Submit written comments - Write to committee members who are considering the bill. This is best if done at least one full day before a committee hearing, but the deadline to submit is the end of the day the bill was heard.
- Testify in Committee - remote and in-person live testimony. Given that a Committee chair can move the bill order around, this may require that you sit through a full 2-hour committee meeting in order to be heard.
- Meet with a legislator - In Olympia. Contact the Legislative Assistant to request a meeting (usually no longer than 15-minutes). This is especially useful when you have a personal story to relate about an issue.
Note that you can write about any issue/bill to your three district legislators through the Leg.wa.gov interface. New this year is the ability to send to multiple legislators outside your district. This is done by looking up your Legislative District members on the site, and when composing your message in their form, you can identify a bill number and ALSO SEND a 7,500 character message and up to 20 Mb attachments to the other 146 legislators. Don't spam everyone on everything. But used judiciously, this can save a lot of work.
Bills that CCRP members should track:
This list will be built out each week with approximately 5 committee sign-in suggestions.
Don't forget that you can receive email notifications for key bills that you personally want to follow. This is done via the Get Bill Notifications button on each bill detail page.
Tune in to the meetings every Monday where we can also answer questions about any of the above. Bring any news of other key bills we might need to follow and get active on.
Buckle in as the majority party democrats forward more tax bills.
Please RSVP to the committee chair Bob Runnells (PCO479@clarkrepublicans.org) if you'll attend
