Housing affordability, public safety, and educational funding dominated discussions at the 33rd Legislative District’s town hall meeting held on Saturday, Mar. 15, 2025 at Highline College, where lawmakers addressed community questions and outlined key priorities for the year ahead.

State Sen. Tina Orwall, Rep. Mia Gregerson, and newly-appointed Rep. Edwin Obras spoke and fielded questions from around 200 community members, emphasizing challenges posed by the state’s projected $12 billion budget shortfall.

House Bill 1380 & Homelessness

Rep. Gregerson addressed the hot-button “elephant in the room” that possibly helped fill the nearly packed, full house – House Bill 1380 – which failed to make it to a floor vote by the majority leadership and expired in committee on Mar. 12, 2025.

“I know that House Bill 1380 has been a little bit of a fire starter in both the left and the right of the issue, or however you want to talk about it,” Gregerson said. “And I’m really proud of us of actually wanting to lean in and talk about it. Because for so many people, it doesn’t go far enough. And for some people, it goes too far. And if anything, it’s getting us to the place where the counties, and many of the cities, and the cops, and the prosecutors, we’re all in the same room talking about … ‘what is it?‘ … because we can’t keep moving people from one jurisdiction to the other.”

“Housing and homelessness continue to be top issues,” Rep. Gregerson added. “No matter … how much we’re doing, people are still suffering. People are dying earlier because they are forced to survive in the elements. And a tent is not a place where people should be able to live with dignity.”

Lawmakers also highlighted recent legislative efforts to protect vulnerable workers. Rep. Obras discussed his bill expanding protections for isolated workers, such as janitors and security guards.

“As you may know, a few years ago, the legislature passed an isolated workers bill to help our janitors, our housekeepers, and our security guards, many in the district obviously because of the airport, to have those protections around safety,” Obras said. “But there wasn’t any mechanism to really enforce it. And so my good little freshman bill is being heard in the Senate on Monday.”

Sen. Orwall, who has worked extensively on public health and housing, noted her ongoing push for behavioral health initiatives, including the expansion of the state’s 988 mental health crisis hotline.

“At the end of the day, we want to save lives,” Orwall said, describing efforts to develop crisis response teams as alternatives to traditional police responses.

Airport Issues, Captions, Education

Orwall also addressed the importance of keeping the Port of Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport in check.

“The airport has a huge impact, and it’s going to take our community really standing together with our cities to really push back because of the harm and health care conditions that we face,” she said.

Orwall also spoke about a bill that would require movie theaters to include open captions.

“A constituent came to me around open captions in the theater, and we’ve been working on it several years, and we hope that this year it passes the Senate, but it allows for more screenings of open captions,” she said. Again, we want it to be inclusive where all families can go to the theater and enjoy that.”

Orwall also spoke passionately about educational priorities, including her support for continuing incentives to attract highly qualified teachers to underserved Title I schools.

“We must support our Title I schools,” Orwall said. “My daughter is a teacher, and the demands of the profession are immense.”

Budget Constraints

The legislators all acknowledged the difficulty of balancing priorities with 2025 state budget constraints.

Rep. Gregerson, one of the House budget writers, emphasized, “We are committed to careful budget cuts, prioritizing essential services while seeking progressive revenue streams.”

Lawmakers concluded by calling for continued community involvement and collaboration.

“What keeps us in politics today is service to the community,” Obras said. “It’s about the people in this room, and those who couldn’t be here.”

Video

Below is edited video of the event (with fixed/sweetened audio), as filmed by Scott Schaefer: