We offer this selection of victors from this year’s session with the caveat that we know very little about Gov. Bob Ferguson’s enthusiasm for the veto pen, so some of this stuff might take a big hit at the goal line.
The Winners
State employees
One of the largest issues, both politically and budgetarily, that the Legislature had to grapple with this year was whether to fully fund the pay and benefit increases negotiated by former Gov. Jay Inslee’s administration and unions representing the state’s workers.
In the end, most of those workers got all they bargained for, which is a major win for Mike Yestramski, head of the Washington Federation of State Employees, his members, and organized labor writ large. Both Gov. Bob Ferguson and Senate Democrats proposed some form of haircut on those contracts, but House Democrats sided with the unions and ultimately prevailed.
No word on whether Ferguson and Yestramski will hug it out after the labor leader called the governor a “ratfink” for courting the union’s endorsement during his campaign and then proposing a series of unpaid furlough days that would have taken $300 million out of their pockets.
– PQ
Tenants (at least in the short term)
Debts came due this session for Democrats after leaving tenants at the altar two years running. The Year of Housing 3.0 bought hard-pressed renters some peace of mind, however fleeting.
This year’s rent cap bill is as much an upshot of the Legislature’s leftward tilt as the harrowing scope of our housing crisis. Seattle recently made the list of priciest cities in America to rent in and Puget Sound’s outlying communities aren’t too far behind. Eviction filings are reaching all-time highs, outpacing the rest of the nation.
House Bill 1217 sets the ceiling higher than its cheerleaders wanted. A hard cap of 10% is still a lot of dough for a lot of tenants. That’s not to mention its effect on the housing market. But it beats nothing if the roof over your head right now is your only option.
– Tim Gruver
Big Tech and its billionaires
A few weeks back, the metaphorical fiscal guns of the Senate Democrats revenue package were firmly trained on Microsoft’s sprawling Eastside campus and the uber-affluent communities nearby.
A payroll tax on companies that employ highly paid nerds would have hit tech’s bottom line hard, and a wealth tax would have sheared its executives, investors, and stock-rich retirees.
Tech fought back hard, with a pricy lobbying campaign and a little bit of ballot-measure saber-rattling. In the end, neither the wealth tax nor the head tax happened. Tech took a smaller hit in bill increasing business & occupation tax rates overall, but the portability of both tech wealth and tech jobs continues to make steep taxes aimed at that sector a dicey proposition.
– PQ
Organized labor
Passage of the edgy pro-union idea of allowing striking workers to collect unemployment benefits paid for by the companies they’re striking against is perhaps the most striking example of both labor’s enhanced pull and the continued leftward shift in the Legislature.
– PQ
Special education students, parents, and teachers
The biggest chunk of money for schools this year goes to shore up special education services around the state. That $350M for the next two years was coupled with a landmark policy shift in the form of lifting an arbitrary cap that assumed that no more than 16 percent of a district’s students qualify for special education services. The money is still less than half the need, but it’s still a big win. Sara Kassabian went deep on the larger K-12 picture yesterday.
– SK/PQ
Affluent school districts
School districts with big property tax bases and voters willing to pay higher taxes (think Seattle, Bellevue, Mercer Island, and Lake Washington School Districts) are now unrestrained by a limit of $2.50 per $1,000 in value or $2,500 per student (adjusted for inflation) designed to promote equity across the state. That should immediately help school districts with levies on the books that exceed those limits.
For these school districts, this is a big win that could them deal with rising costs and provide more enrichment activities for students. For the state, it unlocks more money for public education, without costing the general fund a dime. Poorer districts? They’re going to be in the “losers” edition.
– SK
Gun Control advocates
For years now, a new session has meant new restrictions on buying or carrying a gun in Washington. This year saw Democrats venture into uncharted territory with a slew of gun-control laws aimed at keeping more guns out of ill-suited places and out of the wrong hands.
Part of that push included the permit-to-purchase program ensuring would-be gun owners know how to handle the firearm they’re buying and a strict ban on flashing guns in public parks and buildings. The session also marked Democrats’ first bout with bullet control, ensuring fewer people can stockpile armories of ammunition on a budget.
Between Olympia’s progressive majority and swelling interest among voters, rest assured we’ll see more gun-control bills to come.
– TG
For-profit housing interests
For anyone in the business of building or selling homes, this session was another big springboard towards creating more of them.
The Realtors and the builders came swinging for the fences to do just that and crossed a host of top-tier items off their wish list. That included shoring up more of the middle-income housing lawmakers legalized circa 2023, from fourplexes in rural Washington to inner-city duplexes with or without parking. Neighborhoods will support more small-scale infill—backyard cottages, duplexes, or what have you—per the lot-splitting bill whose time came this year.
Much of the homebuilding bills this session boiled down to cutting costs. Case in point, lawmakers cut condo builders a big insurance break and loosened the elevator rulebook for people slapping together buildings with six or fewer stories. And local governments won’t have a blank check to disapprove middle housing projects under the Housing Accountability Act.
All that may take some of the sting out of their severe distaste for price ceilings like the strict rent cap House Bill 1217 nails to the rental market, one they argue will kill investment and thereby housing supply over the long run. Same goes for the transit-oriented development bill that made it to Gov. Bob Ferguson’s desk, complete with its own affordability mandates. Case studies from around the nation show strict price controls are more than capable of hampering the housing market to great degrees.
You can expect to see the Realtors and the builders seated behind the drawing board of next session’s Year of Housing.
– TG
Affordable housing
We’ll also note that the state’s Housing Trust Fund, which doles out dollars for affordable housing projects geared towards low-income residents, scored an all-time record of $600M this session. The beleagured fund still has no definite revenue stream, leaving repeat developments like this anything but certain.
– TG
New-school recycling advocates and local solid-waste departments
The “extended producer responsibility” system imposed by Senate Bill 5284 will eventually put the cost of recycling all that stuff you currently throw in the big blue bin on the people who sold you the stuff. That’s roughly $10 per month that local solid waste utilities won’t have to charge their ratepayers, aka their voters. Proponents of the idea argue that it will drive packaging producers to use more recyclable and recycled materials and reduce the amount of theoretically recyclable stuff that just winds up in the landfill. Opponents argue the cost of an expensive system will ultimately wind up on consumers. Like the unemployment benefits for striking workers, this is an example of why elections – and retirements – have consequences.
– PQ
Keeping student workers safer on the job
A bid to keep students safer on the job was signed into law by Gov. Bob Ferguson on Monday to prevent repeats of the tragedy that inspired it.
House Bill 1644 from Rep. Mary Fosse, D-Everett, was spurred by the horrific case of a Battle Ground teen who lost his legs to a trenching machine while working for a Vancouver-based construction company. Per Lizz Giordano’s piece from Cascade Public Media, the teen in question was brought aboard the company through a school work program. The ensuing Labor & Industries probe found that neither his bosses nor the school district conducted a mandatory site inspection or saw to it the teen was supervised and assigned appropriate work.
The bill will have L&I officials conduct on-site consultations with employers hosting such work programs going forward and inspect their worksite, top to bottom. HB 1644 also slaps violators with a suite of new penalties for violations. They include $1,000 in fines for poor recordkeeping, failing to obtain relevant permits, or meeting rest requirements; $2K for repeat violations; $15K for related worksite injuries; and $71K for the death of a minor at their worksite. Extreme cases could cost law-breaking businesses lose their operating licenses entirely.
The business community writ large was a hard nope on the bill, which they framed as a solution in search of a problem. A host of unions threw considerable weight behind the bill, arguing horror stories like the one above were one too many. Ferguson agreed with the former, signing the bill at Western Washington Sheet Metal JATC in DuPont, flanked by his fellow Democrats and the union faithful of Local 66 and the Washington State Labor Council. HB 1644 will take effect this July.
– TG
This story initially ran at Washington Observer. You can subscribe here.
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