A 60-day legislative session might seem like a ridiculously short period of time to get governing done for the eighth largest economy in the USA. After all, Sweden has a full-time legislature, and our GDP is higher than theirs. But who’s counting anyway? Washingtonians insist on making life hard for ourselves.
In this episode, Managing Editor Natalie Argerious and I are joined by The Urbanist’s Executive Director Doug Trumm to discuss what went right and wrong in Olympia this year. We go through the highlights of Doug’s Heroes and Zeroes of the 2022 Washington State Legislature article, and get into some of the personality quirks that make politics so “fun.” In the second half, we cover the big legislative wins and losses, including a bit of the political knife fights that prevent anyone from cashing in too many wins.
Like the legislature, we do run out of time to address the year in lawmaking. So, as we promise in the podcast, here is a link to an excellent discussion of the Move Ahead Washington transportation package on the Hacks and Wonks podcast featuring our own Ryan Packer.
Make sure to follow our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Overcast, or your favorite player. Also, do you have a legislative hero or zero to add to the list? Or maybe you want to comment on how a particular bill fared this session? In any case, we want to hear from you. Contact us at podcast@theurbanist.org.
Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.