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The Sunday Observer: The mysterious death of House Bill 1099

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The Sunday Observer: The mysterious death of House Bill 1099

A priority bill for Democrats dies. They blame Republicans, but who really dunnit?

Paul Queary
Mar 13, 2022
5
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The Sunday Observer: The mysterious death of House Bill 1099

washingtonobserver.substack.com

I invoke the little nerd/geek icon from the “…for Dummies” books for this one because we’re going to get down in the weeds about two of the nerdiest/geekiest topics imaginable — the Growth Management Act and legislative procedure.

I’m a little nervous about copping this one. The Dummies empire probably employs some brawling sharks as copyright lawyers. But it’s totally fair use.

At the late-night press conference after the gavel fell on the Washington Legislature’s 2022 session around midnight on Thursday, our sisters and brothers in news1 had several questions about the unexpected death of House Bill 1099, an important but deeply wonky proposal to revise the Growth Management Act to address climate change. After a somewhat tortured path, a negotiated compromise version of the bill had passed the Senate, only to die in the House without a final vote.

House Speaker Laurie Jinkins was quick to blame minority Republicans, who were signaling they were up for more of the clock management tactics we wrote about a few weeks back. In reality, this was a failure of Democrats’ own making. We’ll get back to that in a bit. First, the backstory:

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