Legislative Story Proposals

Story 1:
A cat and dog food tax bill has been proposed to the Washington State Legislature. This state, and are, has an overabundance of feral and homeless cats and dogs. The easiest way to cure this would be for more spay and neuter surgeries. However, most lower income people cannot afford to have these surgeries for their pets. So, this proposed tax is a way to help get the money to get the surgeries for these low income families, and also pets that are already on the streets. There a lot of people I can talk to about this, including the legislators that are presenting this bill, and also the Whitman County Human Society.

Story 2:
With all the proposed budget cuts by Governor Gregoire, one of the groups that has been suggested to be cut is the Pesticide Incident Review and Tracking Panel. It is a group that reviews laws regarding pesticides in order to keep them from infecting the public. They bring a lot of attention to different data, which keeps us safe. In any agricultural community such as Pullman this is very important. This group only gets about $10,000 in funding, so farmers are questioning whether or not it is worth it to shut down this panel and risk it.

Story 3:
The state of WA gets 360 suggestions for what they will do with their share of the economic stimulus plan recommended by president Obama. One of these places is an agricultural research center. What I would write about is what a new research area would mean to the University and to this area of the state. It would be hard to actually talk to legislators on this story, because it is a national decision, but I could talk to people here about how different things get chosen to be suggested to the national government.