Hundreds of constituents of the 13th Legislative District tuned in to a telephone town hall Monday evening hosted by their local lawmakers.

The 13th Legislative District includes Kittitas and Lincoln counties, most of Grant County and a part of Yakima County, and is represented by Sen. Judy Warnick, R-Moses Lake, Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, and Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake. With more than 300 listeners at one point, constituents listened to their legislators speak on the difficulties and successes of the 2018 session.

Warnick was quick to mention the first signed legislation of the year, a capital budget and a fix for the state Supreme Court’s Hirst decision, which had slowed or stopped property owners from digging permit-exempt wells on their land. Warnick was a key figure in Hirst fix negotiations since early last year, which was recognized last month by the Washington Farm Bureau when it named Warnick as the Legislator of the Year.

Dent went through some of his legislative priorities, from regulations on airports and legislation on rural response to fires, to what Dent called a “foster parent bill of rights.” A Quincy resident pressed Dent about his proposals on improving wildfire preparedness.

Though some of Dent’s proposals have fallen into the abyss of cutoff deadlines, he said that he still expected progress on fire-wise building codes and forest management regulations, as well as allocating responsibility for fires that occur in political no-man’s-lands. These no-man’s-lands occur where no district is clearly in charge and no district wants to spend their limited resources fighting those fires, Dent said.

Manweller took time to break down some of what he found most troubling about the agenda of the Democratic majority in Olympia, including attempts at gun control, carbon and capital gains taxes.

Constituents consistently expressed concern over the increases in property taxes, as well as the prospect of new taxes. One resident of Cle Elum asked about the $1.4 billion in unexpected revenue the state will take in over the next biennium, and whether the legislature will therefore lower property taxes and refrain from levying new taxes.

“Of course we don’t need any additional taxes,” Manweller said. “When you just increased education spending by $8 billion in the previous year, and then we come pack and realize we’re sitting on a $1.4 billion surplus, a carbon tax or a capital gains tax seems almost silly.”

In the wake of the Florida high school shooting last Wednesday, where 17 people were killed, lawmakers discussed how they would tackle that situation.

“Almost every time, the kids know about it before the adults do, but the kids don’t tell anyone,” Manweller said.

Manweller’s bill would have created an anonymous two-way communication system via app that students could use to report suspicious behavior to their school’s principal, but the bill never made it to the House floor. In a newsletter sent out Tuesday, Manweller said that he would attempt to revive the substance of the bill as an amendment to another piece of school safety legislation.

The telephone town hall, originally scheduled for an hour between 6-7 p.m., went about 30 minutes long to accommodate a high volume of questions.