Most Washington voters want their lawmakers to be at the Legislature in session during the entire year, according to a new poll from the Northwest Progressive Institute, a non-profit based in Redmond.<\/p>\n
Of the 615 voters polled, 59% said they would support changing the Washington Constitution to allow the state House and state Senate to be in regular session year-round. The Constitution currently limits odd-year sessions to 105 days and even-year sessions to 60 days. The Legislature or the governor can call a special session, but those can’t last longer than 30 days.<\/p>\n
These session limits might have worked back when they were first put in place, said Andrew Villeneuve, executive director of Northwest Progressive Institute, but now Washington has a much larger population, with much more complex needs.<\/p>\n
“We’re now a state of over seven million people,” Villenueve said. “We’re a bustling state. We have a lot of challenges because of our growth and growing pains. So we should have a Legislature that’s meeting year-round to address all those issues, instead of trying to cram all the work into 60-, 105-day sessions.”<\/p>\n
While Washington’s 60-day short session is often considered a time crunch, neighboring Oregon has a short session of just 35 days. Some legislatures meet for an even shorter time of about six weeks.<\/p>\n
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 10 states have legislatures that meet year-round, including Alaska, Hawaii and California.<\/p>\n
Villeneuve hopes the idea catches on with both parties and said a year-round Legislature could benefit the minority party in particular, as the majority party tends to prioritize its own legislation before cutoff deadlines.<\/p>\n
States with year-round legislatures often have breaks to allow legislators to go home and campaign, but lawmakers can generally craft policy on a less hectic schedule. In part-time legislatures like Washington’s, policy can “die” due to tight deadlines to get policy through certain parts of the legislative process.<\/p>\n
“Why does [policy] have to die? What’s the point? Right? The only reason that we have the cutoffs now is to manage the chaos of the session, because we’ve imposed these 60- and 105-day constraints,” Villeneuve said. “But if those constraints go away, then presumably you can also get rid of the cutoff for policy, which means the policy can be considered year-round. There’s not this mad dash.” <\/p>\n
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on Facebook and Twitter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most Washington voters want their lawmakers to be at the Legislature in session during the entire year, according to a new poll from the Northwest Progressive Institute, a non-profit based in Redmond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":69886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-69885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-northwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69885"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=69885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}