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News / Opinion / Columns

Camden: Technology helps us keep in touch with the Legislature

By Jim Camden

Published: January 13, 2016, 6:00am

Keeping tabs on the state Legislature, which can feature competing floor sessions or dawn-to-dusk committee hearings, is challenging for denizens of the state capital but even more so for residents around the state.

The Internet and other technology make it easier than a generation ago, both for reporters in Olympia and for readers at home across the state. Here are a few tricks of the trade used by the Capitol press corps:

• Catch it live. You can watch many floor debates and some committee meetings live, either on the cable television feed for TVW or, if your Internet connection is reasonably fast, at www.tvw.org. TVW has a daily schedule on the website both for television broadcasts and for webcasts. When both houses are involved in floor action, one is being carried on television, while the other is on the website. When the chamber that’s on television takes a break — which happens sometimes without much warning and for an unpredictable length of time — the television feed switches to the other chamber.

• Catch it later. While most people have seen TVW broadcasts while flipping through the cable channels, not as many people may be familiar with the network’s archive. It saves floor sessions by date, as well as hearings for nearly every House and Senate committee. Video of a hearing usually shows up on the site a few hours after it concludes.

• Use the state resources. After all, you help pay for them. The Legislature’s website, www.leg.wa.gov, offers a wealth of information beyond phone numbers and addresses for lawmakers. The home page has a link on the left for the bill information page, which is among the most useful for tracking legislation. If you know the bill number, enter it into the search window. You’ll get the legislative history, including vote counts, and links to the original bill and its changes.

If you don’t know the number, click on “search the full text of a bill,” which goes to an advanced search engine that allows you to find bills or statutes by topic for this and several past sessions. Check the box for “All Bills, Memorials and Resolutions” for the broadest search of session activity.

• To find out how much money is being spent and where it goes, use the site maintained by the Legislative Evaluation and Accountability Program at www.leap.leg.wa.gov. It shows the current budgets for state operations, capital projects and transportation, as well as past budgets since 1979. When new budgets are proposed, they go on the LEAP site.

Budget breakdowns also show up on www.fiscal.wa.gov, which is good for comparing spending for current things such as public schools, government operations or natural resources with what each chamber proposed and passed. Users can search for state employee salaries by name or department, and the site maps spending on transportation and capital construction projects by county and legislative district.

• Use other websites. The caucuses in each chamber have their own blogs that tout the wonderful things its members are doing, with news releases and video clips. House Republicans have the Capitol Buzz, House Democrats the Advance, Senate Democrats the Hopper, and Senate Republicans have Washington SRC. The Senate also has a page for the Majority Coalition Caucus, which is all the Republican senators plus Democrat Tim Sheldon, who isn’t listed anywhere on the Senate Democrats pages.

All can be found from the main legislative site. There’s a fair amount of fluff, and for a balanced view on a controversial topic, you’ll want to check all sides.

Washington State Wire, www.washingtonstatewire.com, compiles government and business news from other news outlets and policy websites. Washington Votes, www.washingtonvotes.org, has a good search engine for tracking which bills legislators introduce and support.

Many legislators and their staffs also use social media, as do most reporters. Most legislators can be followed on Facebook or Twitter, or look for #waleg, the hashtag that usually accompanies news tweets about legislative news for the session.

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