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(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for the Crosscut Ideas Festival.

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- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Sara Bernard Crosscut's podcast producer, and I'm the host and producer of Crosscut Reports, a weekly podcast where I interview reporters about their work, which is, in fact, what I am about to do right now because this is, in fact, Crosscut Reports, just the live version.

So today we are here to talk about what happened in Olympia and that has included, as you might have heard, some big news this week about Governor Inslee deciding not to run for a fourth term, but mostly we are gonna focus today on a pretty eventful session in the Washington State legislature, where we saw lawmakers do a number of impactful things, including passing bills on housing, gun regulation, and of course, most importantly, officially establishing the first ever state dinosaur.

That's for real.

They really did that.

One thing they didn't do was find a fix to the state's drug possession law before the session was over, which we will get into in a bit.

I am joined today by Joseph O. Sullivan, the state politics reporter at Crosscut, who's been covering the State House in Olympia for nearly a decade and has previously reported on state politics for the Seattle Times, among other outlets.

Also here with us is Melissa Santos, a reporter with Axio Seattle, previously with Crosscut and a number of other outlets.

She's also covered state government and politics for many years, and, like Joe, has been closely following what the legislature has been doing this spring.

Melissa and Joe, welcome and thanks so much for joining me today.

- Thank you for having us.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

- All right so Joe, a lot has happened over these past months, a lot.

I wanted to start by asking you what you think the biggest headline is to come out of the legislative session this year?

- Well, there's a lot of big stuff on housing, and lawmakers, there are a lot of big things overall, but I think the thing that really grabbed when you look at sort of national headlines and stuff was the firearms restrictions that we passed here at the legislature.

Three pretty big bills, but of course the ban on the sale or importation or distribution of assault weapons is kind of the the biggest one.

And that's the sort of thing that Democratic lawmakers have sponsored for years and years of the legislature.

It's gone nowhere.

Often, like other really ambitious firearms proposals, it sort of sat around, and this year was the year they felt they could move it, and they pushed it through and the governor signed the law just recently.

- Yeah, could you kind of back up a little bit and first give us kind of the lay of land?

What does this new ban on assault weapons do exactly?

What kind of weapons are we talking about, and what kind of restrictions?

- So the bill sort of creates a definition of what's an assault-style weapon is, you know, based on sort of components on the weapon, a semi-automatic rifles, you know, AR-15s, weapons like that.

There's some, I believe semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic shotguns that are included in there as well.

So those are no longer gonna be available for sale in Washington state.

If you already own one of those, you are still allowed to possess it, but you can't import them in.

You can't transfer them, broadly speaking, and they can't be sold.

- Mm-hmm.

And Melissa, Joe touched on this a little bit.

I understand, you know, the assault weapons ban.

This is legislation that Governor Inslee, Attorney General Bob Ferguson specifically requested.

This is legislation that democratic lawmakers, some of them have been leaning into for some years.

Why do you think it passed now?

- Well, the lawmakers were pretty open last year, saying we have a democratic majority, we actually gained seats in a year when Democrats were thought to be destined to lose seats, they gained a seat or two, I think two total in the legislature.

And they did that after they passed a ban on high-capacity gun magazines.

And one of the lawmakers, the Senate majority floor leader, I think in fact, said to me is, "We didn't face any electoral consequences for doing gun measures.

The voters seem on board with what we're doing.

We think we can go after an assault weapons ban," essentially.

And that, they did get an extra vote or two through that election, but more than that, it sort of said that this wasn't an issue that's going to hurt them at the ballot box, and people either support it or are okay with what they're doing, and they went forward and they did it.

- Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe, I know you've done some reporting on this too, there's sort of like a, it seems like a sea change that's been going on in the past decade in Washington.

I mean, it used to be that even democratic lawmakers kind of didn't wanna touch some of this stuff, right?

- Yeah, so a little bit of history, if you go back to the late 1990s, there was actually a statewide initiative to require trigger locks for handguns.

And that ballot measure failed by two to one across the state.

So to sort of give you some context, and then democratic lawmakers would openly said for years after that, you know, they didn't wanna put new restrictions through, and then you started to see ballot measures get on the November ballots and approved before voters on firearms restrictions in 2014, 2016 and 2018.

And then Democrats gained full control of the legislature starting in 2018 and started to do smaller gun restrictions or, you know, maybe not as sweeping ones, and moving them through the legislature.

And I think to Melissa's point, last year's law banning high-capacity ammunition magazines, that's probably the first really big sort of restrictions that were put through the legislature.

And then of course, they led to this year.

And there's the two other laws this year are one creates some liability for firearms manufacturers, but another one will institute a 10-day waiting period for all would-be gun buyers as well as are requiring you to have a safety training certificate.

So that's a pretty sweeping measure as well.

- Mm-hmm.

- It was rolled back though, it is noteworthy that there originally was a permitting requirement in that bill that would've actually required people to get sort of a permit or a license to own a firearm, that was taken out, that was deemed for whatever reason, too far to go, even though I believe some other states do have similar registration requirements.

- Mm-hmm.

Right.

I remember Inslee talking about that at the beginning of the session, sounding a lot more like a driver's license, but now it's a safety class?

- Yeah, you have to do a safety class and you have to kind of show that you did that.

So, I mean, arguably maybe that's similar, but you know, it is different than having to get an actual card to get a gun.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

All right, so we're talking about three pieces of legislation in this session, basically, these three.

Mm-hmm.

Joe, not everyone supports this legislation obviously, for example, there's already been a lawsuit filed against the assault weapons ban.

Can you tell us a little bit about that lawsuit and what do your sources say about the likely outcomes of this suit?

- So, I don't know, I guess your first question.

So, you know, the firearms community, you know, it's nationally sort of the states are splitting off, right, and you see conservative states rolling back the restrictions they have, while you see more progressive states putting forward, you know, newer restrictions and more restrictions on guns.

And with that sort of change, the Second Amendment Foundation, which is a Bellevue Gun Rights group, and other groups have spent a lot of time really focusing on court cases to overturn laws, and also to take cases up to the Supreme Court to see if, you know, there might be more rulings up there, enshrining the Second Amendment and making it stronger sort of on the record.

So this is, you know, can be seen sort of through that lens.

And, you know, in Washington state, plenty of courts have upheld gun restrictions before.

Our Democratic lawmakers say they styled our legislation off some other states that have already had and succeeded against court challenges.

But of course, you never know what a court's gonna do.

And we do have a United States Supreme Court that is a (indistinct) more conservative these days, and it remains to be seen how their, you know, decisions up there even maybe from another state, remains to be seen how they all shape laws in our own state in the coming years.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Let's close this section by talking about the big picture.

Of course, we are kind of touching on that already, but big picture politically, I'd like to hear from both of you.

Melissa, what do you think the political implications of this suite of firearms bills will be in Washington state going forward and potentially across the country?

- Well, you know, we're the 10th state to enact something like this.

Hawaii has a sort of unique law.

All the states kind of have sort of unique laws, but the 10th state to ban some form of so-called assault weapons, and, you know, that does put us in the, you know, 20% of states that have done this, a minority of sort of blue states that have taken this step.

And that really sort of fits in with what a lot of this session was about, to me, was sort of distinguishing Washington from some of the conservative states passing, you know, either loosening gun restrictions in some cases or not taking action, but in other areas as well, especially on abortion and when it came to healthcare for transgender people, the state also was trying to distinguish itself on that.

So we saw a lot of bills sort of protecting abortion access or trying to sort of push back against other states' laws.

So it's almost as if the Democrats and the majority in Olympia, it's like their opponents were almost not even in the capitol.

It's like the other states that are doing this stuff, sort of had this huge presence, this huge presence in Olympia this year, I think.

- Mm-hmm.

And Joe, same question for you regarding firearms.

What do you think the political implications of this suite of firearms bills will be in Washington state and elsewhere?

- Well, I think Melissa hits the nail on the head is that, you know, a Washington state sort of taking sort of a stand and charting a course in the direction that it sees, you know, the democratic lawmakers want the laws to go, you know, with guns, it's always a little difficult because first of all, there's so many guns, right?

And Washington, when you think Washington, you know, we're an old western state, right?

We had very loose gun laws for a long time, culturally.

They're kind of part of parts of the community.

So I don't know, what the short term impacts will be.

There's a lot of firearms out there, and at the end of the day, you know, more people die in Washington state from suicide rather than homicide.

More firearm fatalities come from handguns, as opposed to rifles in Washington state.

So, we'll sort of see, I mean, I think when I think about these laws, you think of like a lot of different laws they've passed over many different years, at some point you would imagine they'll start to add up, or not, and we'll find out.

- Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

- I do agree with the Democrats who thought they wouldn't get blowback.

I think that's probably correct, given that the voters actually kind of led the way on gun control in our state with a bunch of initiatives between, I think, you know, in the, in the 2010s, and in 2018 the voters passed a measure that raised the age to purchase semi-automatic rifles to 21, and they've done in doing stuff like that.

So the voters actually were ahead of the legislature on this a little.

So I don't think they'll be some huge outrage with voters trying to get these people out.

But I do think nationally people will be saying, look at Washington, this liberal left coast state or what, look at what they're doing.

And there'll be people saying that in our state too.

But I don't know if there's enough of them to kind of un-elect all the Democrats who did this.

- Mm- Mm-hmm.

A quick reminder to all of you watching at home that we are gonna be asking your questions too, so please be sure to enter them in the chat section on your screen.

Melissa, you already brought up something I was gonna ask you.

Speaking of other nationally resonant issues, yeah, the way that the Washington state legislature has sort of been bucking some national trends we've been seeing in Republican-controlled state legislatures regarding, specifically regarding abortion and gender-affirming care.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the bills that we saw the legislature pass this spring in that regard.

Could you tell us about those bills and the reasoning behind them?

- Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest ones that the governors just signed into law is what some refer to as an abortion shield law, sort of.

It basically says that if people come to Washington State to get an abortion and they're coming from a state that restricts that practice, restricts that procedure, our law enforcement can't, you know, send over information, courts aren't supposed to participate with subpoenas to assist with those other state's investigations, because some states have made it have a criminal penalty to have an abortion.

And same for doctors who maybe provide those abortions to out-of-state residents who travel to Washington.

There's been a big concern about those state laws in Texas and Idaho that have really cracked down on abortion, reaching overstate lines into Washington and other states that still allow abortion, 'cause we have it protected in our law.

And so this is designed to sort of create a wall between Washington and those other states so that those laws can't reach over here.

And it also applies to gender-affirming care that people may seek if they're transgender and want either some sort of medical treatment that confirms their gender identity or conforms with their gender identity to kind of support them there.

We allow that sort of broadly and have been expanding, even insurance coverage for that kind of care, while other states have been really limiting it, especially for minors.

So the same bills that apply to abortion also will prevent other states that are investigating or trying to create legal liability for people who get gender-affirming care, it will protect those people from some of the reach of those laws if they have come to Washington to meet with a doctor here.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it seems like a lot of these bills, if you kinda look at them on, you know, the way that the vote lines up, they are really democratic agenda items.

I mean, they really do follow along party lines.

Do you get the sense that Democrats feel like they've kind of gotten what they wanted on these issues?

Do you get the sense that they might revisit any parts of these issues in the next session?

I don't know.

- On abortion, I mean, they didn't get everything they might have wanted.

For instance, governor Inslee was talking about a constitutional amendment that would protect the right to abortion in our state constitution.

That did not happen.

It takes two-thirds vote of the legislature to amend the Constitution and there are Republicans who exist in the legislature and it's more than a third of the legislature is Republicans still.

So that did not happen.

And I mean, hon it never was going to happen, honestly, but it was something that the governor and others said would help provide greater protection to ensure future legislatures can't roll back our abortion protections.

So they didn't get everything.

I mean, will they revisit that?

Perhaps, but it's always gonna be a long shot.

I'm trying to think if there's ever been a time when there's been that few republicans who, you know, largely have been anti-abortion in the legislature.

There hasn't been less than a third Republicans than any time I can remember looking back.

It's been a long time at least, so.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, now I wanna keep moving, keep moving.

There's a lot that happened in this session.

I wanna move on to another really huge issue for the country, but also certainly the state of Washington, and one that was not in fact dictated by the Democrats.

There was a rare bipartisan effort this session to tackle the state's housing affordability crisis.

Joe, could you first tell us about House Bill 1110 and the missing middle?

What does that bill do and why is it significant, would you say?

- Yeah, so this bill is sort of probably the keystone of a sort of a slate of housing bills that passed this year, surprising even some of their supporters.

The bill starts to get rid of, you know, single-family zoning and exclusionary zoning in cities that have kind of, you know, dictated where people live and where people can't.

And so House Bill 1110 weakened as it went through the legislature, but it still provides there for to be duplexes in a lot of neighborhoods across the state now.

And also fourplexes and sixplexes up in larger cities, I believe.

And so the idea is that, you know, we're somewhere north of 200,000 homes short at the moment already, and we're continuing to fall behind every year for the people that live here and then also are gonna move in the coming years.

And in fact, legislative leaders, I think the, it was a Department of Commerce report concluded that we're gonna need another million units of housing in the next 20 years or so, but zoning laws, housing legislation, it can be unpopular in neighborhoods.

The city's resisted some of these proposals or sort of worked to kind of get them to a less ambitious place that they felt they could support.

And there were other bills that passed this year, too, to streamline permitting and make that easier.

And there was a bill, another bill to pass that start to address the systemic discrimination in housing with people of color being locked out of neighborhoods for generations that sort of also gets into single-family zoning.

So lawmakers got done sort of a surprising amount on this front this year.

- Yeah, and I was curious about that, because I know some of your reporting had mentioned that some of these bills regarding density, regarding zoning, some of these bills or some versions of these bills had kind of been languishing for years before they were taken up this time.

And I was curious, why do you think this session, what changed and why now?

- Well, two key bills failed last year, the middle housing proposal last year, and as well as another one on accessory dwelling units.

We're doing, you know, like backyard cottages, and legislation on that pass this year too.

But what happened was that a bipartisan group of lawmakers got together with a sort of an eclectic group of organizations across the state from very progressive organizations in Seattle, like the Sightline Institute in Fuse, Washington, all the way to very conservative sort of institutions politically, usually like the Building Industry Association of Washington and then trade unions like the Master Builders of King and Snohomish Counties.

And they all got together and said, and signed a letter and said, look, we need to make some real progress on this year.

It's bad for low-income people, this has contributed to historic systemic discrimination.

It's bad for the business climate.

There's reports out there saying that, and of course you've gotta consider about preserving Washington's agricultural land too, when you have a lot of sprawl.

And so a lot of people came together and said, we need more density and they're powerful interests that can often stop bills like that.

But this year lawmakers were able to get them past the finish line.

- Mm-hm.

Melissa, did you have any thoughts on that?

- I do.

I mean, I think that there also were some interesting carve outs sort of created this year.

You know, there was a, initially this bill kind of would've required, you know, fourplexes and sixplexes in, I mean, most cities over a certain size, and even duplexes in a lot of other smaller ones.

And there's sort of some visions in there now that allow cities to only apply these new density requirements, which are less stringent anyway, you know, they're not requiring necessarily four-plus-plexes and sixplexes in as many places as the earlier versions of the bill, but there's also this sort of position that cities could take saying we only need to apply these increased density requirements to three quarters of our residential lots.

And I suspect a lot of cities will take advantage of that.

And you know, that kind of, they can do that to say, you know, some of these areas are at risk of displacing longtime residents in a way we don't want to see.

And kind of, I'm interested to see how many cities, you know, choose to apply this to only 75% of their city, and there's some hoops they have to go through to do that, but I think without that flexibility added to the bill, the cities may not have gotten on board in the same way to get this through the legislature.

- Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Always the loophole.

(laughs) Also, Melissa, there were some big housing proposals that did not pass this session.

First off, there was that $4 billion bond proposal that Governor Inslee was gonna pass on to voters.

There was, I believe, a real estate excise tax proposal and then I'm a renter, so I was watching the proposal to put a cap on rent increases.

None of those passed.

So, yeah, so Melissa, I was wondering, what are your thoughts on why didn't these things pass?

- You know, anytime you're gonna ask voters for something, I think legislators think about it very carefully.

In this particular case, they wouldn't necessarily have directly raised any sort of tax on individual homeowners or renters to pass the governor's $4 billion plan to build housing, but I you mean it would've increased the state's debt level.

That's why you need, would've needed to go to voters for permission.

And you know, republicans certainly argued, hey, this will kind of create some carryover effects where maybe there'll be taxes raised in other areas to kind of cover some of this debt service that this would incur.

So I think that this is just hard to go to voters for something, you know, like that.

It would've perhaps made the session more about, you know, asking voters for things than some of the other significant things they were trying to focus on, like gun measures.

Also, I think that the landlord lobby is extremely strong in Olympia.

That's always been the case.

And some of the proposals to limit rent increases to, you know, the inflation or 3 to 7% sort of whatever is required by the bill, there were various versions, that was hard for landlords to stomach, and there was some concern that it might increase the cost of housing and have some landlords be less likely to rent their properties.

And I think that's always something that comes up at the legislature and there might be some truth to that, but it's just a really hard thing to do when they're focused on these other bills.

You just can only do so much in a session sometimes for lawmakers.

And I think they kind of chose to focus on the Missing Middle housing bill and the density requirements.

And so maybe next year they'll focus again on the sort of, it's not exactly rent control but sort of limiting the rent increases.

That might be an issue that comes up again next year.

I'm sure it'll come up, but maybe they'll be more inclined to focus on that issue next year.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Joe, what do you think?

I'm just curious.

- I think that if you ask the lawmakers themselves, they'll acknowledge that, you know, a lot that they wanted to get done didn't get done on housing and they'll be back next year with more proposals.

One that died was a republican proposal to split lots.

So if you own like a five acre lot, you could split lots to put one additional housing on there.

And that's something that, you know, another way to sort of create more ways to get more, you know, housing for people.

That proposal will be back next year.

I was told by representative Andrew Marcus.

To Melissa's point, you know, when you sort of look about, you know, they don't, they can't give everything all of their attention, and everything's got people opposed to it.

And so some of the rental legislation died, and then as I understand it, there was another housing bill on transit-oriented development that was moving.

It was to make sure, you know, more density in areas, especially in Puget Sound where there's a lot of transit, and then that got caught up with some people trying to do some rent stuff within that bill too to try and still get some of that through, and then I think that all got tangled up and that wound up stalling.

But I know the transit oriented development bill will be back next year and I'm pretty sure some of the other, the rent bills as well.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

All right.

Yeah.

So a lot more to do on housing.

All right, well we gotta get to audience questions, but there's another big topic I wanted to cover before we do.

Speaking of things that did not pass, some of the biggest news to come out of the 11th hour of the legislative session was the fact that lawmakers did not, as promised, come up with a fix to the Blake decision, or a resolution to the state's temporary drug possession law, which will sunset on July 1st unless they fix it.

So we are in a bit of a drama there.

Earlier this week, governor Inslee did, in fact, announce he'd call a special session so that lawmakers can resolve this issue maybe.

Joe, could you briefly recap for us what happened at the very end of the session with that?

(laughs) - Well, lawmakers went into the session in January knowing they wanted to get something done, because it's a temporary law that everybody seems to agree isn't working very well, and that's gonna end on July 1st.

But the House and the Senate had sort of different approaches, and it's an interesting political issue, because both Democrats and Republicans are split, House and the Senate is split on different approaches and they couldn't get a deal through.

But you had Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, and House Republicans are pretty much in agreement, but House Democrats weren't, they weren't fully there on what was coming through the Senate, so they tried to sort of negotiate a compromise.

And then around, I think just before eight o'clock on Sunday, the last day of the session, they put the bill on the floor, and Democrats didn't have the votes for it.

There were no Republican votes, and Democrats couldn't find enough votes within their own majority to pass the bill.

And so it's sort of collapsed in a spectacular fashion.

People were not very happy about it at the end of the night there.

And so now they've gotta come back and figure out some sort of thing that they can get everybody, or enough people on board with, because for a lot of the proposals they've been considering, it's sort of the center that gives the majority, and you'll see conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats drop off of a lot of the compromised measures.

It's a politically tricky thing.

- For sure.

I mean, what specifically are they arguing about exactly?

I mean, I know criminal justice, drug possession can be a politically strictly issue.

What specifically is it falling apart around?

- Joe, do you wanna handle that one or you want me to?

- Sure.

(laughs) - Go ahead and jump on.

- We've both been writing a lot about it.

- You jump in, Melissa whenever you want.

- Yeah, I mean the level of criminal penalty, I mean there are folks including the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington that think that drug possession should be totally decriminalized, and there are people in the legislature who also would prefer that path.

And what we have now is a law that, right now, the temporary law that you said is expiring July 1st, it makes drug possession a misdemeanor, not a felony like it was before the state Supreme Court struck down that law, but there's also, you know, a sense that more that something else needs to happen here.

And so there are folks that wanna keep it a misdemeanor and kind of create a better system for sort of directing people to treatment, because right now it's difficult to track that, even though the law says people should be sent to treatment currently and supposed to get the charge just dropped on them, but now others think it should be gross misdemeanor.

So that was a lot of the debate.

Gross misdemeanor versus misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor could mean more like jail time of up to a year.

And there's some that just felt that was way too harsh of a penalty, especially people who really would like to see it totally decriminalized.

That was just a no-go for them.

It still wasn't gonna be a felony.

None of the Democrats, I think, were gonna try and make it a felony again.

That's what Republicans, some of them, wanted, to be honest.

But yeah, that just debate between whether it should be a simple misdemeanor, which is a much lower penalty, lower fine, lower jail time versus a gross misdemeanor was the core thing that I think they couldn't agree on.

There's a lot of complicated parts of the bill with treatment as well, but I think that criminal penalty, it was just, they disagreed too much over it.

- Hmm.

- Yeah.

And and the crux of that as we're talking about like what criminal penalty should there be, if any, is the question is like how do you, like what will compel people to get treatment?

Because even a lot of republicans will say, you know, there's some Republicans that would like to return to a felony, but even a lot of republicans say, you know, we don't want to throw people up like, you know, into prison.

That's not working.

We need to find a way to get people treatment they need, but how do you actually get somebody to go into treatment who doesn't want to?

And how do you track that?

In the current law right now, the temporary law that's about to expire, and Melissa correct me if I'm wrong, but it's something like, it's a misdemeanor, but the first two times you would be arrested, the offer's supposed to direct you to voluntary treatment.

- Yeah.

- But the different cities don't even track who's giving out those referrals or not.

So- - And if they completed it.

I mean, that's the other thing that's been a concern.

The prosecutors don't necessarily know how many times before they've gone to treatment.

How many offenses are we at now?

That's been a problem.

- Wow.

- Sorry, go ahead, Joe, if you have more.

- So it's very complicated.

And now, so they didn't figure it out by the end of the official session.

I understand Governor Inslee has announced at least that he's gonna call for a special session.

What happens next?

So the idea is that they're gonna figure it out by July 1st.

What are your thoughts?

I mean, are they gonna figure it out?

Probably, maybe, maybe not?

What happens if they don't?

What do you guys think?

- Well, I guess there's, I was sort of thinking about this morning.

I could be wrong, but I think there's sort of three scenarios.

They could not figure it out once again, which would be like a more spectacular failure than what they just did.

So I imagine that's probably not gonna happen.

So then the question is do the House Democrats sort of come around to the position of the other three caucuses and they just pass the gross misdemeanor bill, maybe with some more drug treatment elements?

I don't know.

Or they hammer out a completely new deal between Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate.

So I guess we'll see.

I think when the governor put out his news release announcing this, he basically said that, you know, they're still working on it, they're still talking.

- Yeah.

- So there's not a deal yet, even though they'll be set to come back soon.

- Right.

Sometimes the deadline, 'cause special sessions expire after 30 days, but the governor could call another one before the July 1st deadline if they're not done.

And I'm trying to remember, I mean there was a time they had to finish basically everything, but they had some issues with a Supreme Court decision on water rights and then if the capital budget got caught up in it.

I can't remember, Joe, if they did two special sessions for that or not.

I'm trying to remember.

But sometimes if there's no guarantee that just 'cause the special session is called, that they'll go in there and do it in three days, like I think was what the governor might prefer, you know, a swift resolution to this.

They could delay for 30 days, keep going, and have the governor might call another special session.

They're coming up to that July 1st deadline and being like, okay, okay, okay.

They usually respond to deadlines.

Like, Joe and I have covered many sessions where 24 hours before the government is set to shut down, they finally come up with a deal to avert a government shutdown with the budget.

They respond to deadlines.

So I wouldn't be totally surprised if it takes a lot closer to July 1st than we think for them to kind of come to a political arrangement and agreement, 'cause this is just such a complicated issue with different people in different corners of it, and it's not really divided by party cleanly either.

- Mm-hmm.

- Or we just have no penalties for drug possession come from July 1st, and then the cities, and I've been writing some about this, and I think others have, obviously others have been writing as well, all these city council members, including in Seattle, have been proposing their own penalties for public drug use or drug possession.

And so it's not necessarily that drug use will be legal everywhere, or there'd be no criminal penalties for drug possession anywhere in the state, but they might be local ones that then are different from one jurisdiction to another, you know, could we throw something over here?

- Yeah, I think at the end of the day, that's probably the thing that will get them to reach a deal, presuming they get a deal.

Because I think that's the, you know, how do you have a state where you go county from county and the drug laws are gonna be different, and city to city?

And I think they wanna avoid that.

- And I do think majority Democrats don't want the message of their session where there's a lot of things like we talked about that they think they're proud of.

They don't want them whole take away message to be like, we just decriminalized drugs necessarily with no real plan, with it not being sort of an intentional decriminalization.

I don't think that's what any of them want.

Even the people who want decriminalization would rather do it as a conscious choice, as opposed to just sort of a political failure to find a plan.

- Right.

That makes sense.

(laughs) That makes sense for sure.

All right, we got a lot of audience questions.

I wanna get to the audience questions.

There's so many.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Well, yeah, let's talk about Inslee a little bit, because he has announced that he's not running in 2024 for an unprecedented fourth term, so that's kind of a big deal.

Here's one version of that question.

What do you think the domino effect will be now that Inslee isn't running again?

Who will run for what?

And what positions will open up?

- Joe and I have both written about this, so Joe, you can pick it if you want.

I don't know.

(Joe laughs) - Well I'm just gonna refer to your work probably, 'cause you did story this week already.

Right?

- I did.

And I think I did the whole, I did a few versions for Crosscut even of the like, here's what might happen if Inslee runs for president and then doesn't, gets a counted position, and all these things that were sort of speculated over time.

We all know, and now it's been made official, that Attorney General Bob Ferguson wants to run for governor, and in fact he has created a campaign committee to run for governor now.

It says it's exploratory, but it's a committee to raise funds for a governor run, so he's pretty much running at this point.

And there's a lot of people who wanna run for Attorney General.

I mean State Senator Manka Dhingra, who chairs the Senate Law and Justice Committee, and the State Senate has told, for a couple years, has been interested.

Former Seattle City Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez was interested a few years ago.

I don't know if she still is.

There's gonna be a lot of trying to get Attorney General, and that in turn is gonna open up a lot of positions either in the legislature, in city councils.

And so everything's been kind of bottled up with Inslee seeking a third term, which was also really a rare.

So I think there's just gonna be a lot of shifting around because a lot of people are gonna run for this stuff who won't get it, and then their positions will be open in some cases, a lot of the cases anyway.

So more people can rise up and run for those.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I think to that point, and you know, people I think are expecting Public Lands Commissioner Hillary Franz to jump into the race too, so there's another statewide elected office that people are gonna want to run for.

And so yeah, we're likely to see a lot of dominoes.

- Mm-hmm.

- Yeah, and then, I was surprised by this but, well anyway, we could talk about speculate on lots of scenarios, but there's a state senator who's kind of been a thorn in some of the more liberal Democrats side, State Senator Mark Mullet did tell me he's really mulling a run, and people have been asking him to run for governor, and I was like, "Oh, okay."

But I think he would have to not be on the ballot for Senate again, so that could open up some legislative seats.

That's kind of how that works.

You can't be on the ballot for two offices on the same ballot, in most cases.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

- All right.

All right, so totally different topic.

Legislators and the governor have said for several years that mental health is near the top of the legislative agenda.

Did they do anything substantial on behavioral health this year?

Maybe mental or behavioral health this year.

- Go ahead Joe.

- They put more money into behavioral health this year and also to address again the Trueblood decision, which was one of two court rulings in the last decade that really sort of laid bare the deficiencies in our state's mental health system.

But the fact that court decision on Trueblood I think came down in 2014, and here we are almost 10 years later and we're still, the state's still struggling to respond to that.

And just to be clear, that was, I'm reaching back into my memory, but that was the court decision about warehousing people in jails who need competency and restoration services or evaluations before they can go to trial.

You know, we just have a sort of a broken pipeline for treatment, and lawmakers and the governor have been putting a lot of money into this for a lot of years now.

They've sketched out a behavioral health plan to put more facilities all over the state and boost the number of beds, but it's been a struggle for them to get there.

So we'll see.

- And I think the drug issue has also complicated this, because a lot of beds, I mean, there are specific beds for drug treatment, but behavioral health is sort of an umbrella term that kind of covers both drug drug treatment, in some cases, and mental health services.

And I think the focus on trying to ensure that drug treatment's available has kind of siphoned off some of the energy for some of the mental health work, even though it's still happening.

And I think that Blake holdup also is gonna kind of slow down some of the investments in treatment beds, and some of the facilities as well that could have been built.

- Mm.

Mm-hmm.

This might be just your guys' opinion, but interesting question.

What's the biggest issue the state legislature isn't tackling and why aren't they?

- Well, before this year I would say housing.

They've just been, they've been really slow to move on some of the permitting and regulation and zoning stuff that it's just gonna take to build a whole lot more housing.

And I also say that 'cause it's not just housing as in, oh you're a home buyer, you're gonna buy your first house, you're a middle class person, but a shortage of housing sort of impacts people all up and down the income spectrum.

And so when you have less housing, it's gonna make it harder for renters to keep up.

It's gonna potentially push more people into homelessness.

But I think that we were just talking about mental health, right?

Mental health has been something that lawmakers have focused on for many years now and it's still a problem, and it shows you just how big these societal problems are and how it takes so long for the legislature to be able to kind of identify the problem, figure out some solutions, get moving and do the things necessary to correct them.

So as far as our next problem, I'm not sure Melissa, is there any pop into your mind?

- Gosh, I would refer to your work Joe.

They don't seem to really care about a lot of government transparency issues anymore, and this is something that's important to journalists, but they just keep trying to like find different ways to hide their working records.

It's just kind of, frankly, annoying.

I know that's not really an issue that probably concerns the public as much, but if we can't really figure out what they're doing, we can't really tell you guys what's happening, and that's always kind of annoying.

They've kind of just doubled down on new efforts to try to kind of keep their, some of their documents secret.

And that's pretty disappointing in a way.

- Yeah, and we're seeing, you know, we're seeing a rollback of democracies around the globe, right?

We're seeing it harder to get information in the United States from on what your government's doing from the federal government.

Our FOIL law is not doing as well as it used to by some metrics.

You know, we're moving to a more opaque society, and the democratic majorities here in Washington are going along with that so far, and it remains to be seen how far they're gonna take us backsliding.

Washington's Public Record Act is considered sort of nationally recognized as one of the strongest open records laws, good government ethics laws in the nation.

- Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Another, yeah, topic for a whole other panel, I feel like.

(laughs) But yeah, but Joe has done a lot of great reporting on that, so check it out, crosscut.com.

I feel like I only have like one more minute, so I might not have enough time to cover this all, but this is sort of related to the shield laws.

Do we ever coordinate with other states to try and pass bills to address interstate issues?

- I think we have on climate change, and taxes actually even.

The bills don't necessarily pass, but earlier this year there were many states that introduced a wealth tax to kind of target people with a billion plus or something in assets.

And many states were part of introducing bills the same day, and they on climate change sometimes we are coordinating with California trying to kind of make sure when we do carbon exchange markets...

I'm not using the right terms now, 'cause I'm sort of rushing, but when we're doing cap-and-trade and stuff, that we are not creating a system that doesn't jive with other states.

- Right.

- Yeah, in fact, the cap-and-trade law, I think in theory, it's gonna start to work with other states like California.

I think I was even told Quebec, their law in Canada too.

And and the idea is to start to build that network where those states are working in concert.

And on other things, you know, we might build a bridge finally with Oregon over the Columbia River, which is a little, that one's needed.

(Sara laughs) And then, but I think to Melissa's point, to earlier, what she was talking about abortion and gender-affirming care too, is Idaho is an interesting example 'cause it really is where you see the places where the states are starting to split apart a little.

I mean, Idaho is right next to us.

A lot of people come here for medical treatment and medical care, and our laws, our shield law on abortion and transgender-affirming care comes as they are passing criminal penalties.

You really see these ideological differences.

You know, that's a fault line, the Idaho-Washington border, and we're going to see more of that stuff I think in coming years.

- Absolutely.

All right, on that note, I think we are officially out of time.

Thank you so much to the panelists for sharing their thoughts.

Thank you to the audience for joining us today at the Crosscut Festival.

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