Here's a quick update on a few of the bills we're tracking as the session winds down.

1) The unemployment insurance bill, which was supposed to get kicked back to the House yesterday from the Senate with the Senate asking the House to "recede" from its pro-labor amendments, is still in the Senate. However, the Senate is still expected to kill the House amendments—reforms that upped the amount of money workers got and broadened eligibility. 

Rep. Tami Green (D-28, Fort Lewis), who added those amendments to the bill on the House side, told me yesterday that she's disappointed about the Senate's apparent position, but said—if she couldn't round up the votes to stand her ground—she'd likely still want to send the watered-down version to the governor's desk. There's a technical fix in the bill that's necessary to bring in federal dollars for about 20,000 unemployed workers. 

2) As PubliCola readers know, the legislature has been toying with I-937, the voter-approved renewable energy initiative, all session. As things last stood, environmentalists were okay with a compromise that scaled back the changes to the initiative. However, that deal is blowing up for two reasons. First, as we reported yesterday, Tacoma's utility—Tacoma Power—wants a loophole out of meeting the renewable energy standard, and Tacoma's delegation in the House won't budge.

Today, there's a second problem: The compromise included a promise to environmentalists that an expiring tax exemption for renewable energy would be (no pun intended) renewed. The votes for that provision—it's worth about $20 million—are reportedly disappearing. 

3) And as for an issue we weren't following (because it didn't seem real at this point), the idea of an income tax is officially dead. The Seattle Times has the story.