Housing and homelessness bills are still alive after cutoff

We passed the biggest early session cutoff, where bills need to have passed the chamber in which they were introduced or be considered dead for the year. You may now be wondering whether all of the housing and homelessness bills are all dead. Don’t worry, the House and Senate have declared the three major bills Necessary to Implement the Budget (NTIB) and therefore exempted them from the deadlines.

The document recording fee increase HB 1570, the local options tools bill HB 1797, and the omnibus homeless and housing revenues plus GMA buildable lands amendments bill SB 5254 are all in this place. However, this is a bit of a double-edged sword because once a bill is declared NTIB, it tends to lose a lot of momentum. If history is any indication, these issues will likely be wrapped into the end-game discussions. There may not be many outward signs of life on these bills, but they are very much still in play.