Edgar Walters, an investigative reporter at The Texas Tribune, was stuck with a difficult assignment during last year’s legislative session: covering a topic as dry as the state budget. Walters learned that at the start of the session, the House had a plan to spend $23 million on a pay raise for some personal attendants who help people with disabilities perform daily tasks, funded by Medicaid. (Even this sum would lead to only a negligible increase in attendants’ wages — about 10 cents an hour. Now, their base pay is about $8.) He connected with advocate Susie Angel, an Austin woman with cerebral palsy, to learn more about what this would mean for Angel and others who need the support of these workers to live independently.

The resulting piece juxtaposes Angel’s legislative advocacy with her own efforts to find and retain a personal attendant. It introduces readers to Sandy White, Angel’s attendant, and White’s struggle to make ends meet on a caregiver’s wage. And it contains thorough research and reporting on broader budget questions: With so many competing priorities, who should get a piece of the budget — and how do they make their case to legislators? The story was supplemented by a tweetstorm; a dozen photographs and an episode of “Under the Dome,” the Tribune’s documentary-style series documenting the legislative session. Episode 8 followed Angel and another advocate as they lobbied legislators, Angel arguing that the current wage wasn’t enough to find and retain high-quality caregivers.

After speaking with her, State Rep. John Zerwas reflected that “there’s nothing that tells you more about the need for something than to see a person who has been impacted by the budget decisions we make.” Spending time with Susie Angel opened Walters’ eyes to the lack of wheelchair accessibility in Austin’s public spaces. On their roughly half-mile journey from Angel’s office to the Capitol, they had to take a circuitous route to avoid damaged sidewalks and stray scooters — a literal example of a government that’s difficult to access. The biggest obstacle to the reporting, meanwhile, was getting access to lawmakers’ offices. After extensive effort, the staff of Zerwas, who is also the House’s chief budget writer, agreed to let the Tribune sit in on one of their meetings with Angel and other disability advocates.

This was a major win for the Tribune, because such lobbying is typically done behind closed doors. It became a key scene in the story. And Walters balanced the work of a 3,200-word feature with the demand to produce daily coverage on the fast-moving Legislature as the multimedia team worked to meet weekly deadlines. The Tribune team learned a lot from Angel and White, including the transformative work that attendants do for people with disabilities, the struggle of living on a part-time job with low pay, the difficulty of advocating for health care spending in fiscally conservative Texas, and the richness of life that Angel is able to experience — thanks in part to valuable services like her attendant, which can only exist with hard-fought state funding. The story also taught them that it is possible to produce compelling, humanizing budget coverage by looking at the people who rely on state-funded services.