ESSB 6656 — State hospital practices
ESSB 6656 was introduced in the 2015-16 Washington legislative session by WMHill. It became law.
- 2015-16 session
- Senate
- Became law
- 1 public hearing
- Sponsor: WM(Hill
Source Washington State Legislature web services: legislation, hearings and roll calls · as of 2026-09-09 · introduced 2016-03-03
01
Where it stopped
Became law
- Last recorded action
- Effective date 6/28/2016*.
- Session law
- C 37 L 16 E1 — chapter and year in the session laws
- Last committee
- Senate Ways & Means — the last committee with this bill on an agenda
- Public hearing
- Yes — 1 on record — a public hearing is where testimony is taken; an executive session is where a committee votes
Source WA Legislature bill history — every row links to the chamber record that establishes it · as of 2026-09-09 · how a stop point is read
02
What it would do
The Legislature’s own description. We do not paraphrase legislation.
Concerning state hospital practices.
Legal title AN ACT Relating to the reform of practices at state hospitals;
Source WA Legislature bill digest and text, quoted whole · as of 2026-09-09 · edits none — we write no summary of our own
03
The votes
Recorded floor votes. Committee votes are in the hearing record below.
HOUSE · 2016-03-29
Final Passage
78
yea
16
nay
4
absent or excused
This roll call is not broken out by caucus. We hold every member’s vote. What we do not hold for this session is the chamber roster that says which caucus each of them belonged to — the roll call itself prints a surname and nothing more. Matching a surname to a party is the name-only identity join this site refuses everywhere else, so the split is withheld rather than guessed, and the totals above stand as filed.
SENATE · 2016-03-29
3rd Reading & Final Passage
32
yea
11
nay
6
absent or excused
This roll call is not broken out by caucus. We hold every member’s vote. What we do not hold for this session is the chamber roster that says which caucus each of them belonged to — the roll call itself prints a surname and nothing more. Matching a surname to a party is the name-only identity join this site refuses everywhere else, so the split is withheld rather than guessed, and the totals above stand as filed.
Sources WA Legislature roll-call archive (floor); chamber roster for party · as of 2026-09-09 · rows 2 recorded votes · key member id printed on the roll call, joined to the chamber roster — never a surname · seats the denominator is the constitutional chamber, 98 House and 49 Senate, not our roster · note committee votes are published as sign-off sheets, not roll calls, and are not counted here; the caucus split is withheld where we hold no roster for the session
04
Sponsors
Who put their name to the bill. The Legislature records a prime sponsor on the bill status; the full co-sponsor roster appears only in the introduced bill text, which we have not ingested.
Prime sponsor
WM(Hill
as printed the sponsor line on the bill status record · introduced in the Senate. A committee substitute prints the committee here, with the originating member in parentheses.
The co-sponsor roster is not on this page. We hold the prime sponsor the Legislature prints on the bill status, not the list of co-sponsors, which is published only in the introduced bill text we have not ingested. A co-sponsor count here would be a number no record we hold contains.
Source WA Legislature legislation service · as of 2026-09-09
05
The hearing record
Every committee meeting where this bill appeared on the agenda. Public is where testimony is taken; Executive is where the committee votes. Anyone may register a position on a bill before its hearing without speaking. Those sign-ins are a public record of who showed up — they are not a poll, not a sample of the state, and not a measure of public opinion. They count the people who knew the hearing was happening.
| Date | Type | Committee | Chamber |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-02-23 | Public | Senate Ways & Means | Senate |
| 2016-03-03 | Executive | Senate Ways & Means | Senate |
Sign-in counts are not held for this session. The committee sign-in record we hold covers 2025-26. Whether anyone registered a position before these hearings cannot be read from what we have, so nothing is said about it.
Last checked 2026-09-09
Source WA Legislature committee hearing records · as of 2026-09-09 · rows 1 public, 1 executive · how hearings are read
06
What changed between versions
| Version | Substitute | Engrossed | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| SB 6656 | — | — | 1st substitute bill substituted. |
| ESSB 6656 | 1 | 1 | Effective date 6/28/2016*. |
We do not hold the bill text, so we cannot say what changed. The version list shows that the bill was rewritten and how many times. Comparing the substance of two versions needs the text of each, which we have not ingested. The Legislature publishes both.
Last checked 2026-09-09
Source WA Legislature bill text archive, every version · as of 2026-09-09 · note versions are listed, not compared — a field-by-field diff is prepared by a person or not at all
08
What this page will not compute
Each of these is a number a reader might reasonably expect. None of them follow from the records we hold, so we do not publish them.
- Who killed it
- We can say a bill was never scheduled for a public hearing. We cannot say who decided that. Chairs control agendas, but the record does not attribute a non-decision to a person, and we will not infer one from a committee roster.
- Why it died
- Withdrawn, superseded by its own companion, folded into a budget, or simply never taken up — all four look identical in the data.
- Whether lobbying affected it
- Washington collects lobbyist compensation and employer registrations, and the summary feed we hold of them carries no bill column — checked against lobbyist_compensation and lobbyist_reporting, neither of which has one. So we hold no documented link between a lobbying report and a bill number and publish none. That is a limit of the extract, not a claim that no filing anywhere names a bill: reading the L-2 report body is what it would take to find out.
- What changed between versions
- We hold the version list, not the text of each version.
- How a member would have voted
- Only recorded votes appear here. A member absent from a roll call is recorded as absent, not as opposed.
- Sign-ins as public opinion
- A hearing sign-in sheet counts the people who knew the hearing was happening and could reach it. It is a public record of who showed up, not a poll, not a sample of the state, and not a measure of what Washington thinks. A bill with more sign-ins against it than for it has not been voted down by the public.
- An importance score
- No ranking of this bill against others, no “major legislation” badge, no prediction of what it will do next. Every bill gets the same page whether it passed, died, or was never heard, and there is no editorial selection of which bills receive one.
09
Common questions
- What happened to ESSB 6656?
- ESSB 6656 became law. The Legislature’s status record places it at “C 37 L 16 E1” — its chapter and year in the session laws.
- Who sponsored ESSB 6656?
- The prime sponsor of record is WM(Hill, as printed on the bill status. This page does not list co-sponsors — that roster is published only in the introduced bill text, which we have not ingested.
- What would ESSB 6656 do?
- In the Legislature’s own description: “Concerning state hospital practices.” We quote the official language rather than summarising, because a paraphrase of legislation is an interpretation.
- Was there a recorded vote on ESSB 6656?
- Yes. 2 recorded floor votes appear on this page, member counts and all. Committee votes are held separately as scanned sign-off sheets and are not counted here.
- Did ESSB 6656 get a public hearing?
- Yes — 1 public hearing is on record. A public hearing is where testimony is taken; it is not the committee vote, which happens in an executive session.
Answers are generated from the same fields as the sections above and emitted as FAQPage structured data, so a machine reader gets the identical text a person sees.
Cite this page
This is public-records reporting. Use it, and say where it came from.
“ESSB 6656 — State hospital practices,” WashingtonIndependents.org, data as of 2026-09-09, accessed 2026-09-16. https://washingtonindependents.org/bill/2015-16-sb-6656/
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10
How this page is built
Every figure above is read from a primary source and rebuilt on a schedule. Nothing here is modelled or inferred; where a source is silent the page says so rather than filling the gap.
- WA Legislature legislation service
- Bill id, titles, sponsor, introduced date, and the history line and location code we render as its status.
- WA Legislature committee hearing records
- Every committee agenda this bill appeared on, and whether each was a public hearing or an executive session.
- WA Legislature roll call service
- Recorded floor votes, member by member.
- Outcome
- Derived, not published by the Legislature. Enacted means a chapter number or effective date is on record; died is only ever assigned once a session has ended; a sitting session yields pending and no death is asserted.
- Not loaded
- Bill text, amendments, committee votes as individual member records, testimony, and fiscal notes.