After just four weeks on the job the 27th District's newest State Representative, Laurie Jinkins, has already made her mark on the State Legislature in Olympia. Jinkins was appointed vice chair of the Health and Wellness Committee (and sits on many others) and has already introduced 12 new bills. Last week, Jinkins welcomed the Weekly Volcano into her Olympia office and answered a few of our questions.

WEEKLY VOLCANO: How are you able to balance your socio-political convictions with your belief in responsible budgeting?

LAURIE JINKINS: That's a real challenge right now. As you were arriving I was meeting with a group of young women who are at the Oakland Early Head Start program who all have kids in Head Start. One of the things we are at risk of losing is subsidized child care, which exists so that those young women have child care for their kids while they are either working and earning money, going to school and learning job skills, or both. I think that it's clear that long-term that is something we would like to do, but (right now) we might not have the money to be able to do that. I had to tell them that I'm very supportive of that, but I'm also very supportive of health care and making sure our disabled adults who don't have anywhere else to turn at the very least have a program that provides them with housing and food. There are many issues like that I am very supportive of, but how many of them we can save in the budget environment we've got is a struggle we deal with every day.

VOLCANO: How would you describe the political culture and the level of cooperation in the Legislature?

JINKINS: It's very interesting in the sense that a lot of the things that you see on the floor and in committee hearings are a little bit like Kabuki theater in that they're very planned. You don't know everything that is going to be said in the House or in a committee hearing, but there has usually been enough conversation at meetings and elsewhere that there is usually an understanding of where Republicans are on an issue and what their concerns are, and the same for Democrats. There are times when we just have fundamental disagreements about the way that we look at the world and how we would handle a situation, but for the most part people work pretty hard to amend their bills to address issues that are raised by the other side. There is a very strong personal respect and like from members across the aisle. Not everybody loves each other, but everybody doesn't even love each other within a particular caucus. For the most part people do really try to get along. For example, the freshman class of Democrats and Republicans try to get together once a month to talk about issues and see if we can help each other advance our bills. It seems to be a rule here that you separate the personal from the politics.

VOLCANO: You bring a wide variety of experience to the Legislature, but definitely have strengths based on your background. Do you see yourself trying to work on many issues or focusing on a few particular issues?

JINKINS: I feel very strongly that I want to work on a wide variety of things, but it can be hard to do so. For example, I sit on a committee, Transportation, where I do not have a lot of expertise, so I have to spend a lot of time learning. Even with the environmental committee that I sit on, I am very good on the environmental health issues because I've worked in public health my whole career, but then there are still many environmental topics that I am not as well versed in. So it takes a bigger commitment to serve on those committees, whereas I can go to Health Care and ask questions and understand with just a couple sentences on almost any issue. I'm finding that it can be easy to get drawn into being a specialist because those are already topics I understand and feel very comfortable with, so I've made a personal commitment to myself to make sure that I really spend a good amount of my energy focusing on committees and committee work that are not as natural for me so that over a session or two they will become much more natural.   

VOLCANO: Have you found there is a benefit to looking at an issue from a fresh perspective?

JINKINS: I think there is and the example that comes to mind is in education. I don't sit on any of the education committees, which has been a huge disappointment (this is in part because Jenkins was appointed vice chair of the Health and Wellness Committee), but I continue to be involved in education issues and I feel, as a little bit of an outsider on those issues, when we have smaller group meetings about them I usually am one of the people in the room that keeps saying "there is not enough urgency about educational reform." I've got a son who is 10 years old, and at the pace we're going now things will be the same for him when he is a senior in high school as they are for a senior in high school now. Unless we have a lot more urgency about this we're not going to move towards reform. I'm not trying to advocate a particular type of reform necessarily, but I would like us to be more focused and feel a little bit more urgency. 

VOLCANO: What have you been most pleased about in the Legislature that you maybe were not expecting when elected?

JINKINS: When I was running I felt like I was going to have to come down here and decimate everything. I was under the impression that there was no money and it was going to be all cutting and eliminating all the time, but that hasn't necessarily been the case. As a freshman I'm coming in and meeting members of the house who started the Basic Health Plan or the Disability Lifeline, so they are seeing dramatic cutbacks to programs that they built and (that) have worked well for people, whereas I came in thinking we're going to have end those kinds of programs, so I consider the fact that we are able to keep them going at all a complete victory. My expectations coming in about what we could do were really low so I've actually been pleased with what we've been able to do. We haven't been able to save everything, but I think we're focused on the right priorities for people. 

VOLCANO: What are you the most proud that you and the Legislature have accomplished so far this session, and what are your biggest goals for the remainder of it?

JINKINS: I feel the same about myself as I do the Legislature. It's very important in any environment, but especially this one, to try to make sure we maximize as much opportunity for every person in Washington that we can. We're in a really tough economic environment that makes that hard, but when you think about the domestic partnership bill that I sponsored, the clean drinking water bill that I sponsored or even the oral chemotherapy bill that I'm working on, they are all really trying to make sure that people have access to safe healthy drinking water, that everyone can protect their family in a tough time like this and that if you've got cancer you've got access to the medication you need to hopefully beat it. I think that the caucus feels that way too. The governor's supplemental budget eliminated the Basic Health Plan and it eliminated the Disability Lifeline which are programs that focus on our most vulnerable citizens. The fact that we were able to save those programs really pushes towards the idea of more opportunity for all. I've been very happy about that and happy about moving those kinds of things forward.