Gov. Bob Ferguson issued his second mild veto of the year this week, excising emergency language from Senate Bill 5351, the compromise measure that arose from that dentists vs. dental insurers throwdown that we wrote about early in the session.
Getting rid of the language tagging part of the bill as “necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety, or support of the state government and its existing public institutions” theoretically exposes it to a referendum campaign to force a statewide vote on the measure, but that’s highly unlikely. The final version of the bill from Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, passed unanimously in both chambers of the Legislature.
Vetoing such non-emergency emergency clauses is something of a gubernatorial staple. As of Wednesday morning, Ferguson had yet to veto anything substantial, although some of the losers of this year’s legislative session remain hopeful.
An Eastern Washington bill-signing jaunt
Gov. Ferguson is scheduled to head across the mountains to Kennewick this week to sign a raft of bills sponsored by lawmakers from east of the Cascades, most of whom are Republicans. Ferguson, a Seattle Democrat, opened his tenure as governor with an overture to the other side of the aisle, which by extension means the other side of the state. Republicans who were looking for bipartisan cooperation on major issues of budgeting and taxation have been largely disappointed thus far. Among the measures on this week’s slate is House Bill 1912 from Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, which clarifies and extends the exemption for fuel used in agriculture from the compliance costs of the Climate Commitment Act.
Housing bill action
Gov. Ferguson is working his way through the mountain of bills on his desk ahead of next week’s deadline. Here’s a few from the world of housing he inked into law.
Green-lighting more childcare centers
There’s yet to be a solution to the ruinous cost of childcare, but a new law will ensure childcare centers can’t be zoned out of your neighborhood outright. Senate Bill 5509 from Sen. Emily Alvarado, D-Seattle, guarantees cities can’t exclude such facilities from their comprehensive plans. That doesn’t mean they can’t restrict them to industrial zones on the edge of town, so long as they’re not built next to high-hazard facilities. Pickup and drop-off areas will be fair game for cities to regulate.
The bill applies to cities updating their comprehensive circa 2027—meaning municipalities east of the Cascades plus Pacific, Wahkiakum, and Grays Harbor Counties.
Middle housing or bust
Local governments will have less leeway to nix middle housing projects without cutting affordable housing builders a break in the process. Senate Bill 5148 from Senate Housing Chair Jessica Bateman, D-Olympia, takes local governments to task for disapproving the middle housing types she helped legalize in much of the state during last year’s Year of Housing — duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, etc. The Housing Accountability Act empowers the state’s Department of Commerce to sanction cities for zoning out new housing supply or limiting it to single-family homes.
Commerce would get to lay down the law in one of two scenarios: A) home production falls below 50% of previous yearly housing production in-county; or B) 80% or more of what’s going online in the local housing market is of the single-family variety.
The real kicker here is the bill’s builder’s remedy, which would require local governments to automatically green light any housing project that set aside 20% of its units for people making 60% of the area’s median income or less.
This remedy mimics a California law which gave Golden State homebuilders freedom to build affordable housing. California lawmakers have since rolled back the law somewhat, requiring new housing projects to abide by site restrictions and density limits, among other mandates. In exchange, lawmakers eased affordability requirements and offered builders more explicit protection from litigation. There’s yet to be much proof on the ground that the builder’s remedy has led to an explosion of affordable housing.
Cities like Seattle and Tacoma are already knee-deep in updating their comprehensive plans and have thereby dodged SB 5148. Eastern Washington cities such as Spokane will fall under its shadow.
Transit-oriented development gets the thumbs-up
This session’s transit-oriented development bid also got its final green light on Tuesday. House Bill 1491 from Rep. Julia Reed, D-Seattle, aims to shore up denser housing around mass transit, namely the 10-minute bus service and light rail around Puget Sound. The new law promises to make affordable housing more ample for low-income families and help the carless get around the perennial costs of driving a personal vehicle.
The law comes with a wealth of carrots and sticks for all parties involved. It ensures a sizable share of new homes built will be set aside for folks earning below area median income via a suite of tax breaks for the developers building it. Folks in the real estate game have long insisted rent-controlled properties just shoo away investors who like making top-dollar off of a given investment.
The new law represents the largest upzone in these parts since Washington’s middle-housing reforms passed back in the Year of Housing. The bill’s effective date largely lines up with when cities update their transit plans, which won’t be anytime soon for most cities this decade, save for Vancouver and Spokane.
Even more leeway for builders
Builders will have more ways to dress up new housing projects without irksome hoops to jump through.
Senate Bill 5571 from Senate Housing Chair Jessica Bateman bans local governments from sinking housing projects based on their exterior cladding materials such as brick, stone, or tile finish. Siding is among the boxes local governments typically check off amid the often draconian design review process by which said projects live and die. Design review at large is among the chief thorns in builders’ sides. One bill aimed at retooling the process from Rep. Amy Walen, D-Kirkland, failed to advance in the House this session.
Lot subdivisions
Divvying up more land in Washington’s concrete jungles just got easier under Senate Bill 5559 from Sen. Liz Lovelett, D-Anacortes.
The new law will affect cities submitting their next comprehensive plans in 2027. They must adopt processes by which property owners can split unit-lot subdivisions. This idea is adjacent to this session’s lot-splitting bill from Rep. Andrew Barkis, R-Lacey. The difference is it would apply to townhomes and other multifamily complexes in the ‘burbs where homes are built closer together.
– Tim Gruver
More high-bid woes for the ferries
For an allegedly retired guy, Tom Banse is all over the Washington State Ferries beat. His latest story details the bids from shipyards to build as many as five new hybrid-electric ferries to freshen the fleet’s lineup of aging and frequently broken boats. Some takeaways: The bids are high enough that the currently available money won’t stretch to five vessels. The low bid came from a Florida yard, acing out Nichols Brothers Ship Builders of Whidbey Island despite a substantial baked-in advantage for home-state companies. Absent from the bidders was Vigor Marine Group, builders of much of the existing fleet.
Lawmakers recently changed the law to allow out-of-state bidders in the hopes that it would force local yards to sharpen their pencils and cut the state a better deal. Federal law requires that ferries be built in the United States, which blocks the state from buying far cheaper vessels built overseas, as our neighbors in British Columbia do.
Hanauer holds forth on Democrats’ problems
Progressive megadonor Nick Hanauer’s appearance on Blue City Blues, the podcast from Sandeep Kaushik and David Hyde, is definitely worth a listen. Hanauer, one of the local very wealthy political players, lays the plight of America’s progressive cities on decades of neoliberal governance and particularly singled out former President Barack Obama for not embracing higher wages for working people more fervently. We were particularly interested in the inside dope about other major donors on the left, who are apparently on board for causes such as climate change but far less enthusiastic about paying the workers at the bottom of their various enterprises a living wage.
– Paul Queary
This report first appeared in Washington Observer
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