Dicey compromise on Blake sets up last-day drama

Plus school construction help runs aground and the House gets its way on warehouses

Editor’s Note: This is a special Sunday edition of the Observer in observance of the last day of the Legislature’s session. The marquee event of the day will be the passage of the state’s operating budget, which we’ll delve into a bit in tomorrow’s edition. For now, a look at some other last-day items.

Lawmakers figure to go down to the wire tonight on one of the session’s thorniest issues: rewriting the state’s drug possession law to deemphasize punishment and prioritize treatment.

The Senate and House passed significantly different versions of Senate Bill 5536, known as the “Blake Fix” earlier in the session, and the bill wound up in a conference committee. “Blake” refers to the Supremes’ decision in 2021 to toss out the state’s law on simple possession of illegal drugs. Lawmakers passed a temporary fix then that has been widely criticized as fostering an explosion of public drug use and related disorderly conduct. That fix expires this year.

A compromise version of SB 5536 emerged on Saturday evening from a conference committee formed to work out the differences between the House and Senate versions. It’s a complex bill that’s mostly about diverting drug users into substance abuse treatment. But in broad strokes, the compromise adopted the Senate’s decision to make simple possession a gross misdemeanor rather than a misdemeanor and the House’s statewide preemption of local laws on drug paraphernalia, which wasn’t in the Senate bill.