Olympia Legislative Report, April 19, 2013

Washington Clean Technology Alliance
Prepared by:  Boswell Consulting

April 28th, the end of regular session, is rapidly drawing near. This Wednesday was opposite house cutoff, meaning that bills had to have passed out of the opposite house of origin to still be remain alive. At this point, the House and Senate have both released their proposed budgets and appear to be far apart on their approaches to funding education and other programs. While both chambers allocate $1 billion into education, the House combines extending temporary taxes and new or increased taxes to fund education. The Senate primarily uses reductions in other programs to fund education. The budget that will probably pass will be somewhere in between those two watermarks. Unfortunately, the two sides have not been working on navigating their differences and it is becoming increasingly likely that we will have a special session.

The House Capital Budget came out this week and, unfortunately, there was no funding in either the House or Senate for the Governor’s proposed $20 million for the Clean Tech Fund. There was included within the Senate budget some concerning language that could trigger a JLARC study on the effects of I-937.

Find the entire report including Bill Tracking here.