‘The public’s right to know doesn’t have much of a lobby.’ Here’s how lobbying affects WA laws

If the iconic “SchoolHouse Rock” series is to be believed, bills can be brought forward by constituents to lawmakers who then simply introduce and negotiate that legislation before it can become a law.

The one thing that wasn’t included in the popular “I’m Just a Bill” song?

How powerful lobbying groups shape decisions on bills and can affect whether legislation is passed.

In February, McClatchy and Crosscut joined together to document the story of how the Legislature has spent more than 15 years attempting to consolidate its power and keep secrets from citizens by invoking legislative privilege. In April, McClatchy and Crosscut wrote about how access to public records could be at risk in Washington with litigation and a change of power in the 2024 elections.

Both outlets again teamed up for this report to show how certain lobbying groups, such as the Association of Washington Cities, can have an impact on legislation in the state.

Housing Bills

During the 2022 state legislative session, Rep. Jessica Bateman, D-Olympia, sponsored a housing bill that would have increased “missing middle” housing near transit areas and in neighborhoods traditionally zoned for single-family homes.

Although a similar bill to add density in single-family zoned areas also sponsored by Bateman was eventually passed during the legislative session this year after some modifications and some co-sponsorship with Republicans such as Rep. Andrew Barkis from Olympia, it was AWC who stopped the legislation from moving forward last year as they felt like they weren’t included in the bill-making process.

“Coming out of last session, it was a tough discussion, and in that case, we really felt like cities writ large weren’t brought into the conversation in a real collaborative way,” said Carl Schroeder, a registered lobbyist for AWC. “It was more sort of like, ‘can we overcome the objections or pick off a handful of cities to find support and not address the broader concerns.’ And so we raised a lot of concern about that, and ultimately the bill died.”

Barkis was also the leading sponsor on a bipartisan bill during the 2023 session that would have increased housing supply through lot splitting, but that legislation did not pass this year.

He noted in an interview that AWC has “a big influence” over housing policy as bills move through the legislative process.

“More so this year, what I noticed is that you have a broad representation of cities, but individual cities and jurisdictions deviated,” Barkis said. “You had many cities saying, ‘We very much support this zoning type of situation.’”

Barkis added that if influential cities are opposed to provisions in pieces of legislation, AWC can use that to “chip away, chip away, chip away” at proposals to weaken them as they advance through the Legislature.

“It’s a tough process,” Barkis said.

Oftentimes, AWC’s attitude about housing is “’Yes, we want to do this,’” Barkis added. “But there’s always a reason they can’t.”

In an interview earlier this year, Washington’s current Lieutenant Gov. Denny Heck, a Democrat and former member of U.S. Congress also noted that the AWC is “a very powerful force.” Heck has been a proponent for housing issues for years.

“First of all they’re statewide, secondly they’re community leaders, and thirdly they have pretty considerable lobbying forces,” Heck said. “Not only the staff capacity here [in Olympia], but then the staff capacity to mobilize your local city council members to call up and say, ‘Don’t you dare do this middle housing bill.’”

While AWC said they were against the middle housing bill because they weren’t brought into the fold of the conversations with other shareholders, the organization also brought forward a public records bill in the 2023 legislative session that had no other shareholders.

Public Records

In January, Senate and House lawmakers suddenly introduced new bipartisan legislation to limit the ability of the public to sue the Legislature and other government agencies for violations of the Public Records Act.

House Bill 1597 would have amended the state’s Public Records Act and would require those requesting records to go through an administrative review process for records requests that have been denied or closed. The process would be required before the requester can take the denials to court for litigation, making the process of seeking records even more burdensome.

Groups such as the Washington Coalition for Open Government (WashCOG) noted in an interview at the time that the bill would make it more difficult for the “public and the press to get timely information.”

A similar version was also introduced in the Senate.

Rep. Larry Springer, a Democrat and former mayor and city council member from Kirkland, told McClatchy and Crosscut in an interview that AWC drafted the bill and brought it forward to him to sponsor. Rep. Amy Walen, another Kirkland Democrat who was also a former mayor and city council member, co-sponsored the bill.

The purpose of the bill, Springer said, was to curtail “frivolous” lawsuits. Local municipalities spent millions fighting litigation from public records violations in previous years, he said, so he sponsored the legislation to change the process and prevent people from taking advantage of the way the system currently works.

But Toby Nixon, a Kirkland City Council Member and president emeritus of WashCOG, told McClatchy and Crosscut in an email that the legislation was “a complete surprise” with “no advance stakeholder engagement.”

Nixon said he found out about the bill the morning it was introduced from Walen. Nixon said that Walen wrote, “Please take a look. This is a righteous effort and I hope you can help!”

That same day, Nixon said he forwarded the bill to WashCOG.

“Here’s an abomination of a bill being pushed by AWC,” Nixon wrote in his message to the organization. “I’m embarrassed that two former mayors of Kirkland, Amy Walen and Larry Springer, are sponsoring it.”

The next day, he said, he composed a list of concerns for the WashCOG board regarding the bill.

Nixon added that he was disappointed because he liked to think he had good working relationships with those involved in the legislation. He said that he hoped to have a “discussion about their concerns and see if we can develop solutions acceptable to everyone.”

The legislation also came just months after McClatchy first reported that lawmakers were using so-called “legislative privilege” to withhold records.

Local governments have strong lobbies in state houses while organizations such as WashCOG have limited ability to lobby.

“The public’s right to know doesn’t have much of a lobby,” Jeffrey Roberts, executive director at Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and board president for the National Freedom of Information Coalition, told McClatchy and Crosscut in an interview.

“I think that’s what we face… you have a lot of people in state houses who used to be city council members,” he added. “And that’s the perspective I think that they often come from…I don’t want to come across as saying that people in government don’t care about openness and transparency. But, they often think from that perspective.”

Nearly one-fifth of current Washington state lawmakers are, or have been, city council members.

Candice Bock, a registered lobbyist for AWC, told McClatchy and Crosscut in an interview that overall she would characterize this year’s legislative session as successful and an overall “good session for cities.” She said that the association had five priorities this year: drug possession, police pursuits, affordable housing, infrastructure funding and behavioral health.

When asked why AWC should be a part of conversations on housing-related legislation, but not extend the same courtesy to other advocacy groups with other bills, Bock said that every group thinks they are unique. However, she said she believed that AWC is not just unique but also a “government partner.”

“I don’t want to suggest at all that we don’t respect WashCOG, and doing that stakeholder process I would have fully expected that as we went through the session if the public records bills had gotten to see the light of day that we would have had stakeholder conversations,” she said. “Oftentimes that’s the way it ends up happening–a bill gets introduced and that’s the start of the conversation, and then the stakeholder process commences.”

There can be good reasons for that, and there can be other reasons for that, such as timing, she said.

“...Good stakeholder engagement is often the key to success in the legislative realm. Generally we’re believers of that and practitioners of it,” Bock added.

In terms of the public records bill, Bock said she expected more stakeholder conversations once the bill was introduced.

Typically, Bock said, groups like AWC will have an idea for legislation and shop it around with different lawmakers they believe will be receptive to the idea. Once they get permission for the bill, it is then sent over to the Code Reviser’s Office to start the drafting process.

This year AWC brought forward less than five bills, Bock said.

Bock added that she believes the public records bills from the 2023 legislative session could potentially be brought forward again next year. Additionally, she said there’s a possibility the association could “potentially get to yes” on the lot splitting bill next year with “further sideboards around it.”

“...As a lobbying group on behalf of local governments we ourselves are subject to the Public Records Act, but I think we’re a pretty open group when it comes to what we are advocating for and why, and being fairly transparent about what we’re working on,” Bock said. “We don’t have any secret priorities or secret agenda, it’s just kind of out there for the world to see. And I think that’s an important part of our work and representing cities and trying to be a constructive part of the legislative process.”

This report was produced in collaboration with Crosscut, a non-profit news outlet.