Alerts: every way OlympiaTrack tells you something happened

The point of tracking a bill is not having a list. It is not having to look at the list. Here is everything that can reach you, and what each one is actually watching.

On a bill

Open any bill and look for the three toggles beside its panels:

• 🔔 Hearings: email when this bill is scheduled for a hearing in the next two weeks, and again if it comes back from the dead. A bill going from dead to alive is the one nobody catches by hand.
• 📝 Amendments: email when a genuinely new amendment is published on it. The first check on a bill records what already exists and stays quiet, so turning this on mid-session does not send you a history lesson.
• 📅 Calendar: put its hearings on your calendar feed rather than in your inbox.

These are per bill and independent of your lists. A bill you are watching but not tracking for a client still alerts.

On a committee

Committees → Follow emails you a daily digest of that committee's upcoming meetings, whether or not any of your bills are on the agenda. This is the one to use when your client's exposure is a subject rather than a bill.

On a subject you cannot name yet

Not every bill you need exists in January.

• Keyword watches search the actual text of bills and amendments, not just titles, and tell you when something new matches. This is how a bill nobody expected, filed under a title that gives nothing away, still reaches you.
• RCW watches follow a statute. Open the RCW reader, find the section your client lives under, and watch it: when a new bill proposes changing it, you hear about it. You can watch a whole chapter rather than one section, which is usually what you want, a client regulated under chapter 19.28 cares about all of it, not about 19.28.041 specifically.
• Agency rulemaking watches the other half of the process. A statute is only half of what changes; the rules written under it are the other half, and they move all year rather than for 105 days.

When they arrive

Alert emails go out once a day, early morning Pacific, as a digest rather than one email per event. During session that is the difference between being informed and being buried.

Every digest links straight to the bill it is about, and to the Notifications page where you can turn any of it off.

What to turn on, honestly

Turning everything on for everything produces a daily email you stop reading by February, which is worse than no alerts at all. A workable starting point:

• Hearing alerts on every bill you have taken a position on
• Amendment alerts only on the bills you are actually negotiating
• One or two keyword watches per client, written from the words in their business rather than the words in the statute
• Committee follows for the two or three committees your clients live in front of

Last updated September 2, 2026.