Legislative Information

BALLOTPEDIA

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_2024_ballot_measures#On_the_ballotAs of April 24, 2024, three statewide ballot measures were certified to appear on the Washington ballot on November 5, 2024.

HIGHLIGHTS

1. Let's Go Washington submitted signatures for six Initiatives to the Legislature, all of which met signature requirements and were presented to the Washington State Legislature. The state legislature approved three of the initiatives and three were certified for the ballot after the legislature took no action on them.

 Legislature wraps 2024 session and Gov. Inslee signs his last bill

Gov. Jay Inslee signed his last bill on March 29, 2024. With that, we can officially close the book on the 2024 legislative session. Many thanks to our state legislators for all the hard work they put in on planning-related legislation this session and congratulations to our governor for reaching this pinnacle moment.

While 2024 was a short session, the Governor’s Office and the Legislature continued the momentum to improve the local planning environment and the Growth Management Act with a focus on housing, urban growth areas (UGA) and more. Let’s reflect with planners around our great state on some of the major Growth Management-related highlights from the 2024 legislative session:

Housing is still the priority

The Legislature passed a number of bills designed to increase the range of allowable housing types within cities. These bills followed the historic policy direction from last session with more infill support and technical fixes. In addition to the bills, the supplemental budget included more investments in affordable housing programs.

• HB 1998: This bill requires cities and counties to allow co-living housing as a permitted use on any lot within an urban growth area that allows at least six multifamily residential units, including on a lot zoned for mixed use development. Co-living housing provides rental housing with private rooms that share common kitchen facilities. This housing type was historically common, but now is prohibited and/or has regulations making it difficult to develop. As a result, cities and counties may not impose requirements on co-living housing, such as room dimensional standards larger than that required by the state building code; providing a mix of unit sizes or number of bedrooms; and including other uses. A city or county may not have development regulations for co-living housing that are more restrictive than those required for other types of multifamily residential uses in the same zone.

• HB 2321: This bill made a few technical changes to clarify the new middle housing requirements enacted in last session’s landmark middle housing bill.

• SB 6015: This bill creates additional restrictions on what a city and county can require in their parking standards to facilitate the construction of infill housing.

Additional local or GMA-related changes

• SB 6140: This bill makes some minor changes to the provisions for Limited Areas of More Intensive Rural Development (LAMIRD). For relatively remote LAMIRDs, the bill expands the size threshold for commercial infill so that these remote LAMIRDs can better serve the surrounding community.

• SB 5834: This bill changes the provision for net-zero UGA adjustments to allow adjustments off the periodic update cycle if certain other criteria are met.

• HB 2296: This bill extends the periodic update deadline for jurisdictions due in 2025 from June 30, 2025, to December 31, 2025.

• HB 1105: Requires that any required public notice must specify the opening and closing date of the public comment period, including the last date and time that written comments may be submitted.

• SB 6175: This bill gives cities the authority to adopt a tax incentive for the conversion of commercial property to multifamily affordable housing.

Summarizing the 2024 Supplemental State Operating Budget

The 2024 Supplemental State Operating Budget includes funding for permit streamlining, supportive housing, greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, and training for permit technicians and building inspectors. Each funding amount supports local governments directly or indirectly to advance their community interests.

• Additional funding for GHG reduction efforts: The Legislature provided an additional $10 million to aid local government efforts in reducing GHG emissions. These funds are for the implementation of programs, services and/or capital facilities included in GHG emissions reduction sub-elements required by HB 1181 (2023). This funding is provided by Washington’s Climate Commitment Act. The CCA supports Washington’s climate action efforts by putting cap-and-invest dollars to work reducing climate pollution, creating jobs and improving public health. Information about the CCA is available at climate.wa.gov.

• Local Project Review Grants: The Legislature made $3 million available starting July 1, 2024, to support the transition from paper to digital permit processing and for streamlining permit approval for housing projects.

• Additional outreach on STEP housing: The Legislature provided Commerce $600,000 to provide additional outreach and technical assistance to support the development of Supportive, Transitional, Emergency and Permanent (STEP) housing. It also funds the provision of a third-party mediator to help resolve disputes between housing agencies and local governments over the siting or permitting of STEP housing.

• Expanded training for new building inspectors and permit technicians: The Legislature provided additional funding to the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and the Washington Association of Building Officials (WABO) to train new permit technicians and building inspectors.

Conversations we’re watching for next session

Over the last few sessions, the Legislature has commissioned several studies and deliberative processes to provide recommendations on how to achieve a number of policy priorities. The following local planning-related studies and developments from the 2023 and 2024 sessions are likely to influence policy and funding discussions in the next legislative session.

• Integrating special purpose districts into the GMA: The Legislature commissioned a study to provide recommendations on how to integrate the planning work of special purpose districts in the GMA. This work will occur over the next year and a half with recommendations to the Legislature due December 2025.

• Improving access to digital permitting: Last year, the Legislature commissioned a study to evaluate the creation of a statewide digital permitting system to facilitate the transition from paper to digital permitting and accelerate local project review. The Commerce advisory committee has been hard at work considering this feasibility study and will have a report with recommendations to the Legislature this summer.

• The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI): After the passage of SB 6120, the State Building Code Council filed an emergency rule to remove all 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code amendment language from WAC 51-55 until the new mapping and amendments are developed. Local jurisdictions are no longer required to adopt the Model Wildland-Urban Interface Code as anticipated. However, they may still do so under the advisement that the existing Washington State Department of Natural Resources WUI map is no longer applicable. DNR is working on new maps.

• Streamlining Approval for Middle Housing: With the passage of HB 2071, the Legislature commissioned the State Building Code Council to examine the building code for ways to apply residential code standards to middle housing. Last year, HB 1042 directed the State Building Code Council to make adjustments to avoid application of new building and energy code standards to the nonresidential portion of existing buildings when they are converted to a residential use. The Office of Regulatory Innovation and Assistance will work with local governments and the building industry to engage a qualified consultant to develop a standard energy code plan set that exceeds energy code regulations. The optional plan set may be used by local governments, building officials, and building industries to lower costs and streamline housing production.

• Creation of a state housing agency: The Office of Financial Management was tasked guiding the development of a pathway to evaluate the cost and feasibility of creating a new consolidated state housing agency that would likely combine a number of state programs that relate to the provision of housing. These recommendations are due to the Legislature by December 1, 2024.

• Riparian habitat protection and restoration: The Legislature continued funding for a collaborative process with state and local governments, tribes, and stakeholders to make recommendations on strategies to better integrate efforts to protect and restore riparian habitat for salmon and steelhead, including voluntary and regulatory strategies. This facilitators for the process are required to provide recommendations to the Legislature in June 2024.

• Agritourism permitting: The Legislature commissioned a study of how other states regulate and permit agritourism. The study includes how to bring advocates of interested groups together to resolve outstanding issues about permitting in agricultural areas for the sale of beer, wine and cider, and the use of agricultural buildings for tourism purposes. A Commerce-led report to the Legislature is due by June 30, 2025.

New Bill Makes Everyone a Spy

Rather than heed bipartisan calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has been used to spy on Americans without a warrant, Congress passed a bill that significantly expands the government’s power to snoop on its citizens. The new legislation could force virtually any business that provides customers with Wi-Fi, from commercial landlords to laundromats, to give the NSA access to the public’s communications. Fortunately, there is still an opportunity to correct Congress’s failure — the fight to protect Americans’ privacy rights will continue.

Noncitizens Aren’t Voting

House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this month that he will push new legislation to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting in U.S. elections. However, as a new Brennan Center analysis explains, numerous deterrents against noncitizen voting already exist, and it is illegal under federal law and every state’s laws. Instead of cracking down on a phenomenon that’s vanishingly rare, Congress should focus on guaranteeing the freedom to vote for eligible voters.

How AI Threatens Voting Rights

Disinformation has long been used to suppress votes, especially from people of color. Now artificial intelligence tools may supercharge these efforts, allowing bad actors to deceive and disenfranchise voters more easily and swiftly than ever before. The final installment in our AI and Democracy series warns of the dangers for the 2024 election and puts forth solutions to protect voters from improper purges and AI-assisted disinformation campaigns.

Accountability Is Essential to Democracy

This week marked the start of former President Trump's criminal trial in New York — a historic first in the United States. Investigating and prosecuting sitting and former leaders for wrongdoing has long been common in other countries, however. While criminal proceedings against top officials come with risks to democracy and should not be undertaken lightly, when pursued fairly and transparently, they help sustain the rule of law.

Loopholes Undermine New AI Rules

Last month, the White House published new rules for how the federal government can use AI. These include sensible protections for the public’s safety and civil rights, but they also give agencies too much leeway to opt out of some of the most important safeguards. As agencies race to adopt AI, raising the risk that these systems could amplify discrimination and abusive surveillance, the Biden administration must make changes to ensure that loopholes are the exception, not the rule.

The HEAL Act requires seven state agencies to create and adopt community engagement plans by July 1, 2022. HEAL also states that the Environmental Justice Council will provide guidance on community engagement plans as agencies create and update them.

What is the HEAL Act Washington State?

The passage of the Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act in 2021 is a historic step toward eliminating environmental and health disparities among communities of color and low income households. It is the first statewide law in Washington to create a coordinated state agency approach to environmental justice.

To learn more click on this link:HEAL Act

A More Diverse Ballot

On Wednesday, the Federal Election Commission will hold a public hearing on proposed updates to its rules for how and when candidates can use campaign funds to support themselves. The changes could make the rules more equitable by easing the heavy financial burden of running for office, giving non-wealthy candidates a fairer shot at a successful campaign. “Ultimately, if we are to have elected candidates that fully reflect America’s diversity, we need rules that help candidates of all backgrounds to run for and win office,” Mira Ortegon writes. READ MORE

The Right to Be Rude in Town Meetings

Citing the freedom of assembly, the highest court in Massachusetts recently struck down a town’s rules for making comments at public meetings. In the case, a resident had been ordered to leave after hurling insults and accusing the board of selectmen of spending like “drunken sailors.” But the court ruled that “rude, personal, and disrespectful” conduct is protected by the state constitution. In the latest State Court Report newsletter, Alicia Bannon explains the case and the fascinating history of this fundamental right in the United States. READ MORE

The Cost of Expanding Victims’ Rights

Since 2008, a dozen states have adopted state constitutional amendments known as “Marsy’s Law,” promoted as giving crime victims important new legal rights. But two pending cases in Wisconsin and Florida argue that these protections infringe on defendants’ rights and government transparency. Writing for State Court Report, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson examines how Marsy’s Law “generates outcomes that are hard to defend in principle.” READ MORE

No one should have to worry about encountering a gun while voting, but only 12 states and Washington, DC, prohibit open and concealed carry of firearms at poll sites.

Banning guns wherever votes are cast shouldn’t be controversial. Think about it — the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision was the most sweeping expansion of gun rights in the history of the country. It wiped out vital public safety laws in six states and invited dozens of lawsuits challenging others across the nation. And yet Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged that Americans have always agreed there are certain places where guns simply do not belong. He specifically named three of them: legislative assemblies, courthouses, and polling places.

It is, in short, constitutionally sound to ban guns where Americans vote. But states have not kept up with the profusion of guns and their new constitutional protection.

In a report published this week, my colleagues Sean Morales-Doyle and Robyn Sanders, along with Allison Anderman and Jessica Ojeda of Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, issue a call to prohibit guns wherever election administration occurs: at or near polling places, ballot drop boxes, election offices, and ballot-counting facilities.

The report comes at a critical moment. For more than 20 years, lobbyists have pushed to loosen restrictions on firearms in legislatures and in the courts. Twenty-seven states now allow people to carry a gun in public without a permit or background check, up from just two in 2010. States that have tried to hold the line against the proliferation of guns have run into a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down restrictions on who can carry a weapon, and where. As a result, there are now more guns than people in the United States.

The spread of guns has coincided — perhaps not entirely coincidentally — with the rise of extreme political polarization and political violence. You know the facts. Election officials have been forced into hiding. Domestic terrorists have threatened actors at nearly every level of government. Police foiled a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. And an armed mob attempted on January 6, 2021, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after a lawful election.

Tamping down the rising tensions about political disagreements so that violence is never on the table will be the work of generations. It will require a cultural shift and a degree of political bravery and will that many of our leaders can’t seem to muster. But getting guns away from voting sites is something we can and should do right now. It’s common sense, it’s constitutional, and it’s absolutely necessary.

Bolstering Voting Rights for All

Today, members of Congress reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to full strength. Damaging Supreme Court rulings, the growing racial turnout gap, and a wave of restrictive state voting laws underscore the urgent need for this essential civil rights legislation. Our new resource details the voting rights challenges the bill would address and how it would help solve them. READ MORE

A Chance to Correct Campaign Finance Failures

The Federal Election Commission has long failed to enforce campaign finance laws, allowing dark money and foreign spending to flood U.S. elections unchecked. Tomorrow, a House committee will question the agency for the first time in more than a decade, presenting an opportunity to push the FEC to do a better job of improving regulations and upholding the laws already on the books. As Daniel Weiner notes, “Any system of rules is only as good as the body that enforces them.” READ MORE

ABA President on Courtroom Bias

Public trust in the courts depends on widespread belief in judges’ impartiality. But studies show that judges are just as susceptible to unconscious racial, gender, and other types of biases as the rest of us. There needs to be a renewed commitment to well-developed, sustained, mandatory training for judges to reduce bias and ensure their decisions are truly impartial, according to a new State Court Report essay by American Bar Association President Mary Smith, Illinois First Appellate District Justice Michael B. Hyman, and University of New Hampshire Professor Sarah E. Redfield. READ MORE

The Fight for Fair Maps Reaches Another State Supreme Court

Today, the Kentucky Supreme Court became the latest state court to consider whether legal challenges to gerrymandered voting maps are justiciable under its state constitution. While many state courts have delivered wins against partisan gerrymandering in recent years, few of these have been in the South. A positive ruling for the plaintiffs in Kentucky “would offer hope — and a potential model — for voters across the highly gerrymandered region,” Michael Li writes in State Court Report. READ MORE

A Promising Anti-Gerrymandering Tool

The United States has struggled to eradicate gerrymandering, in part because almost all American state and congressional elections use single-member districts. As such, districts that a party wins by extremely narrow margins can produce comfortable legislative majorities, creating an incentive for partisan map drawers to manipulate district lines in their favor. One way this problem might be blunted is by switching to a multimember district model in which seats are proportionally allocated to parties based on the votes won. In Democracy Journal, Michael Li and Peter Miller explore the potential benefits of this model and highlight the additional research needed to assess whether it’s a solution worth pursuing. READ MORE

MEANINGFUL MOVIES TACOMA

. Films + Discussion every 4th Friday of the month, open to the public, admission by donation (no one refused entry).  We meet from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM.

Meaningful Movies Tacoma was started in order to gather, educate, inspire, connect and commit our community to the environment, peace, justice, and to build an educated, informed citizenry. We show a documentary film monthly— on the fourth Friday – followed by a facilitated discussion.  We oftentimes involve local groups within our community as part of our discussion to further build community.

SCREENING LOCATION: Center for Spiritual Living 206 North J Street, Tacoma, WA, 98403

CONTACT EMAIL:mdtilstra@aol.com

Know Your Rights: Northwest Fair Housing Alliance Library

New brochures are available in multiple languages to understand and express your rights when facing discrimination.

Northwest Fair Housing Alliance

Mark your calendars for the 2024 Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day (HHAD) which will be held in person in Olympia on January 30! We look forward to advocating in person and alongside you once again!

The 2024 legislative session is set to begin on January 8, and you can help position our priorities for success in the new year. 

These four main priorities together address critical issues for the people in our state who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. And these priorities will provide our state with the protections and investments needed to prevent and end homelessness once and for all, and build a more equitable and brighter future.

• Prevent excessive rent increases with reasonable, statewide rent stabilization
  
  Last year, we championed SB 5435/Trudeau and HB 1389/Ramel, and HB 1388/Macri which all addressed excessive rent increases. This year, there will be one bill (with a House and Senate version) led by Senator Trudeau and Representative Alvarado. This bill will prevent the excessive rent increases that are driving so many out of their homes and into evictions and homelessness.

• Create a permanent fund source for the Housing Trust Fund and for housing for people with disabilities
  
  Last year, we championed HB 1628/Chopp. A new version of the bill will be introduced and led by Representative Berg and Senator Frame. It will reduce real estate taxes for most properties sold in Washington and add a 1% increase to any portion of a property sold for over $3 million. This will increase funding and fast-track the development of new, deeply affordable homes, create and fund a new housing program for people with disabilities, and support the operations of permanent supportive housing for disabled people with experiences of long-term unsheltered homelessness.

• Backfill a gap in funding for homeless services to prevent cuts to shelter, rental assistance, and more
  
  $49 million was appropriated last session (2023) to backfill the shortfall at the state level and $18 million for the local portion. Still, unfortunately, it has turned out that more funds are needed to prevent cuts to homeless services. This is because interest rates remain high, driving down real estate activity that funds homelessness services. The state can address this with operating budget funding to backfill the remaining gap.

• Invest in the front-line workers and nonprofits that make ending homelessness possible
  
  Our frontline workers are struggling with difficult working conditions and low pay that fails to keep up with their own high housing costs. We depend on these workers and they deserve better. Last year we secured a $45.06 million increase in funding to homeless and housing grantees for a 6.5% contract increase. Although this was an improvement, it didn’t match the rise in inflation. More needs to be done, and we will be back this year asking for an additional budget increase in the supplemental budget.
  

These are bold priorities that will make a significant difference in people's lives. But none of them are easy, and a strong statewide coalition will be needed to move them forward.