House Bill 1923, sponsored by Rep. Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island) and dubbed the Mosquito Fleet Act, would have allowed water-adjacent cities, counties, transit agencies and port districts from Olympia to Friday Harbor to set up their own passenger-only ferry (POF) districts. Unlocking the ability to go to the voters for funding to establish new routes, the field of potential ferry districts would be dramatically expanded beyond Kitsap Transit and King County, who currently have specific carve-outs in state law to fund and operate their ferry systems.

Despite an overwhelming 84-11 vote in the Washington House in mid-February, the version approved by the Senate last week is essentially a different bill, following a striking amendment put forward by Senate transportation committee chair Marko Liias (D-21st, Mukilteo). Striking amendments replace all of the text of the bill, causing advocates to scramble to understand the implications of the new language.

Liias’s amendment adds requirements for new passenger-ferry districts to only procure vessels made in Washington State, to only operate zero-emission vessels, and includes a ban on all state funding for passenger ferry districts starting in just two years. It restricts new POF districts from being able to utilize the sales tax funding that current districts use, instead switching them over to a potential property tax.

The new Senate version would also require passenger ferry districts to not overlap and be “mutually exclusive” — language that appears to prevent multiple jurisdictions from being able to coordinate on establishing POF districts. San Juan County Commissioner Jane Fuller told The Urbanist she’s concerned that this means they wouldn’t be able to work with the Port of Friday Harbor or nearby Whatcom or Skagit Counties on setting up potential new ferry routes between Friday Harbor and Bellingham and/or Anacortes.

“I am concerned that the changes will significantly impact the ability of local jurisdictions to move forward with setting up passenger-only ferry service,” Fuller said. “It’s so impactful as to call those amendments — from my vantage in San Juan County, and knowing the situation and other counties that have chosen to be a part of the new county ferry caucus — render the bill in that form, something of a non-starter for local jurisdictions to do passenger-only ferries.”

“We have sister counties that are quite well endowed, like Skagit, like Whatcom, that are interested in partnering with this county on some passenger-only ferry options. So that’s a difficult pill to swallow,” Fuller said.

Nance, who first put forward this bill last year after seeing his district struggle with unplanned service disruptions on the state ferry system, also blasted Liias’s changes.

“The intent of the Mosquito Fleet Act is to let local communities get boats on the water as quickly and cost-effectively as possible,” Nance wrote to The Urbanist via email just before the Senate’s floor vote. “Every single one of Marko Liias’s proposed changes makes things slower, more expensive, and less power for local communities. It makes projects impossible. Zero relief for commuters, zero help for communities, zero jobs under Liias’s proposed amendment.”

Peter Philips, a marine transit advocate and former publisher of Fishermen’s News and Pacific Maritime Magazine, told The Urbanist that he reacted the Senate’s amendments with a combination of confusion, disbelief, and extreme disappointment.

“I don’t understand why this bill did not just sail through with universal approbation. It’s this very simple, elegantly written bill that allows communities to take independent action and fund that independent action on their own,” Philips said. He noted that the requirement to build new vessels, a provision that would likely make new passenger ferry districts ineligible for federal funding, would be incredibly counterproductive.

Last year, the legislators faced pushback from labor groups over Governor Bob Ferguson’s decision to procure the first three new vehicle ferries built in decades from a Florida-based manufacturer, dollars that will now not be spent in state. But the manufacturing landscape for new passenger ferries is very different, setting aside any hypocrisy on the legislature’s part.

“Concerns by labor over Build In Washington mandates for the big ships is justified. However, with small passenger-only ferries, no other state would build these boats,” Philips said. “Gulf coast yards would not be competitive, because the cost to bring those boats around to Washington State would make it cost prohibitive for those yards to bid on the work competitively. There are no other new build yards on the West Coast of the United States that can do this. There are at least nine shipyards that I know of in Washington State that have the ability and expertise to build passenger-only ferries, so there’s no need for Build In Washington mandate.”

In remarks on the Senate floor, Liias described the changes made as being in search of a compromise, while outlining clear reservations about the idea of scaling up ferry service that would compete with Washington State Ferries (WSF) vehicle ferry service.

“My concern, not as a boat lover, but as the chair of the transportation committee, is our state ferry system has tremendous capital needs on the horizon. We need to spend at least $3.5 billion dollars over the course of the next decade to acquire new vessels to replace our aging fleet. And so my priority across time has been to make sure that our state ferry system is healthy and functional and strong,” Liias said. “I’m concerned that creating expectations to create a new system of passenger ferries will create obligations for us to help stand up and fund these activities at a time when we haven’t yet funded our own ferry system.”

If a battle between WSF and future passenger ferry systems is seen as zero-sum as he described, then the policy changes included in his striker take on a new light, and could be seen as less aimed at achieving their objectives and more about kneecapping systems that have the ability to be much more nimble.

Liias was not available for an interview with The Urbanist ahead of the publication of this story.

“This feels like tremendous overreach on what many of us, as jurisdictions impacted by WSF service, would like to be doing in terms of empowering ourselves and coming up with solutions that will offset the impacts to our local economies and our communities of very beleaguered service of WSF,” Fuller said. “It feels like the state is putting its hand in its way and inhibiting any flexibility we may have to be creative about how we do that, including finding cost-efficient ways of doing this by partnering with other other jurisdictions.”

Fuller noted that state ferry service has improved in recent months as the agency has made gains in crew availability and made strategic decisions around how to maintain service on the San Juan Islands specifically. But framed the idea of curtailing additional mobility options as short-sighted given the long timescale to potentially fix the major issues that the state ferry system faces, including a dozen aging ferry vessels set to be retired and in need of replacement by 2040.

Under current ferry construction timelines, WSF will not have all three of the new vessels it recently procured ready for service until 2032, with legislators this year turning down the idea of issuing bonds to get the next three new boats into the construction pipeline.

“We are seeing some positive change. I will be the first to say that, and others would echo that,” Fuller said. “However, we cannot do anything about the fact that vessels are beyond their lifespan, that vessels are needing to be replaced, and that they can’t possibly be replaced, at least in a reasonable timeframe, and consequently we’re going to have more and more crises facing us in times ahead.”

Nance is hopeful that the bill can be fixed after it heads back to the House. That chamber can force the Senate to vote on receding from all of its amendments, but if that vote fails, the bill would head to a conference committee. With just four working days left until the end of the session on March 12, time is of the essence.

“The future of ferries hangs in the balance,” Nance wrote.

The post Mosquito Fleet Act Runs Into Choppy Seas in the State Senate first appeared on The Urbanist.

The bill was one of Sound Transit’s biggest focuses this legislative session, one strategy to tackle the $34.5 billion financial shortfall the agency faces over the next two decades. Testifying in favor of the proposal were some of the agency’s biggest players, including CEO Dow Constantine, board chair Dave Somers, and board vice chair Ryan Mello.

But Monday’s final House transportation committee meeting came and went without a vote on SB 6148, in spite of officials intensely lobbying committee chair Jake Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) over the weekend to get the bill added to the docket and approved.

While the legislative calendar means SB 6148 is dead, the policy change is still very much alive. Wednesday morning, Liias successfully amended another bill that had been sent over from the House, HB 2711, to add the 75-year bond provisions. That omnibus bill tackles tweaks to transportation funding policies the legislature approved last year, making it a natural fit among the other provisions. Whether the gambit is able to pay off before the end of the 2026 legislative session on March 12 remains to be seen.

Allowing 75-year bonds would ultimately bring Washington law in line with a change to federal infrastructure loan programs, including the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA), included in 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law. That change allowed bond terms for specific, long-lasting infrastructure projects to extend up to 75 years, while state law still prohibits bond terms beyond 40 years.

“By utilizing the TIFIA program that Congress recently extended, they can put more projects on the ground more quickly to help deal with the commute in the Puget Sound region, also to create jobs,” Liias said ahead of the Senate floor vote on SB 6148. “The estimate from Sound Transit’s finance staff is that the additional financing capacity they can achieve would help them put 40,000 jobs in our communities building infrastructure for us over the next decade. So we need jobs. We need this infrastructure. The sooner we build, the cheaper it is.”

Issuing bonds with such long term lengths isn’t seen as a slam dunk by all Puget Sound transit advocates, some of whom have raised concerns about asking future generations to pay off funding decisions being made today. Others have argued that pulling this financial lever will allow the agency to get out of asking tougher questions around how to reduce costs and build its infrastructure faster.

The budget-balancing “building blocks” that the Sound Transit board is set to put together in the coming months to bring down those costs are clearly going to involve a wide array of different tools. Constantine has said that the 75-year bonds would make sense for long-lasting infrastructure projects, such as the generational investment of building a second tunnel under Downtown Seattle as part of the Ballard Link Extension project, which is a big ticket item in a project that has seen its budget balloon past $20 billion.

At last week’s Sound Transit board meeting, this issue was a hot topic, with board members discussing potential talking points to convince Rep. Fey to advance Liias’s bill. Board chair Somers spelled out the need to secure this authority now, ahead of the update to the agency’s long-range financial plan set to occur later this year. To legislators, a one-year delay in approving the change doesn’t mean much when it comes to light rail projects happening years down the line, but to Sound Transit that delay would be significant.

“The

The ‘why now’, for me, [is] I heard Representative Fey say he was so excited to be seven minutes away from light rail when we opened Federal Way,” Seattle Councilmember Dan Strauss said. “The ‘why now’ is, I don’t know that we can get much closer to his house without the bill.”

Sound Transit’s other major legislative priority, a bill streamlining permit requirements and allowing the agency to submit permit requests before officially acquiring parcels where projects will be built, was approved by the House late Wednesday, with the full Democratic caucus on the House side in support. It still needs another Senate vote but is on track to head to Governor Ferguson’s desk.

Several hurdles still remain to be surmounted in a small number of days for the 75-year bond proposal to make it to the governor’s desk. The full Senate, which approved SB 6148 on a 29-20 vote, will need to sign off on HB 2711, sending it back to the House. There House members will be forced to concur with the changes made on the Senate side or reject them. Such a move would likely put the entire bill’s future in jeopardy.

The post Sound Transit’s Bid to Unlock 75-Year Bonds Finds Second Wind first appeared on The Urbanist.

House Bill 1175, sponsored by Representative Mark Klicker (R-16th, Walla Walla), would have opened the door to a wide range of commercial uses within residential zones in most Washington cities, with the goal of allowing more corner coffee shops and bodegas to open within walking distance of homes. According to the bill, a cafe is defined as an establishment with at least 500 square feet of gross floor area that must serve food along with any alcoholic beverages, and “neighborhood stores” would be able to sell a broad range of items “not limited to” food, beverages, and household items.

In a conversation with The Urbanist, Klicker placed blame for the bill’s failure squarely on Jesse Salomon (D-32nd, Shoreline), the Local Government Committee’s chair. Despite being approved by the Washington House on a 94-2 vote just four days into the start of the legislative session on January 15, it was never given a public hearing on the Senate side after being referred to Salomon’s committee.

According to Klicker, Salomon communicated concerns around the sheer number of other bills that the legislature has approved in recent years that have given local governments a mandate to overhaul their land use codes, including legalizing middle housing in most single family zones, accessory dwelling unit (ADU) reform, and parking mandate reform. This session, the legislature is likely to add another mandate onto the state’s medium and large cities that will require them to reduce barriers to building housing units in commercial and mixed-use zones. Officials in cities large and small have complained about the timelines to implement these bills and the increased workload they’ve placed on planning staff.

“Senator Jesse Salomon chose he didn’t want to run it. The excuse that he said [was], ‘Well, there are just too many mandates with all the bills,'” Klicker told The Urbanist. “That was his choice, and his choice alone, to decide to do it that way.”

A state senator since 2019, Salomon faces a strong opponent in his bid for re-election this year in Representative Cindy Ryu. Ryu’s challenge against an incumbent was an early signal of the number of left-leaning primary challenges legislators are likely to face this year, with Redmond City Councilmember Jessica Forsythe’s challenge of moderate Democrat Representative Amy Walen (D-48th, Kirkland) coming soon in its wake with others likely on the way.

Two years ago, the Local Government Committee gutted Klicker’s previous version of the bill, under the leadership of then-chair Liz Lovelett (D-40th, Anacortes). Lovelett’s changes, intended to allow the bill to survive until it got to the Senate floor, switched the framework from a mandate on local cities to an opt-in, at the same time potentially outlawing a number of existing corner stores around the state that sell alcohol.

Those changes essentially doomed the bill, prompting Klicker to retool the idea in 2025 and introduce HB 1175, a proposal that was more explicit about the types of businesses that would be legalized in neighborhoods but with some big concessions to local governments. They can set the maximum size of a cafe or corner store — with a minimum set at 500 square feet — and regulate parking “provided that the regulations are not infeasible,” whatever that means. Hours of operation could be limited to half of the day, putting the kibosh on the ability for businesses to be open later in the evening.

HB 1175 was approved in a House committee last year but the session ended before it could get a floor vote.

Salomon’s office provided a very short statement to The Urbanist. “There were, unfortunately, not enough votes to move the bill out of committee this session,” it read.

Despite the fact that it’s repeatedly stalled out, Klicker’s attempt to push this issue may actually have elevated it and prompted local governments around the state to take up the charge. An updated Comprehensive Plan in Shoreline legalized neighborhood commercial uses across most of the city’s blocks, with updated regulations in Burien and Everett soon following.

The latest city to jump on the corner store bandwagon looks to be Renton, which is advancing a proposal that would allow neighborhood commercial throughout approximately half of the city by targeting areas within a half mile of a bus rapid transit stop. But stores would only be allowed on literal corner lots, limiting their potential significantly and stopping well short of what HB 1175 would have required.

A survey Renton conducted last year showed a staggering 86% of respondents agreeing with the idea that there should be neighborhood retail stores and services closer to where they currently live, with 39% of those same respondents saying that cafes and corner stores should be allowed on all residential lots, more than double the number that said they should only be allowed on corner lots (17%).

Seattle now allows cafes and corner stores citywide, after successful advocacy to broaden regulations proposed by former Mayor Bruce Harrell that would have only allowed them on corner lots as is proposed in Renton.

“Every neighborhood deserves places for community members to gather, buy essential goods, create art together, and build a community. But right now, that kind of commercial and community space can be hard to find or afford. Legalizing corner stores would help bring these services and community spaces to every neighborhood,” read a 2025 petition created by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Futurewise, and the Greater Seattle Business Association. Those groups’ advocacy was ultimately successful, with new regulations adopted in December.

In lamenting his bill’s failure again this year, Klicker also referenced the issue of community, noting that residents of Washington’s large cities are more likely to be missing out on the benefits that his bill would have brought, compared to residents of the smaller towns in a district like his where walking distances tend to be much shorter.

“People are losing out on community. Really, that’s what it is, that sense of community people are yearning for,” Klicker said. “I probably wouldn’t have pushed and pursued this bill so much, but when you get, you know, emails and calls to my office, everything over the last couple years, I mean, people begging for this. Sure, there are people that don’t want it because they don’t understand what this would be. They worry that it might be a big thing that is going to bring all these crowds in, and it’s not that whatsoever. It’s just very simple neighborhood, little things that people are looking for.”

The post Neighborhood Cafe and Corner Store Bill Fails for Third Straight Year first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Washington State Urban and Community Forestry (UCF) Program provides technical assistance to local governments, tribes, and nonprofits across the state when it comes to work to plant and sustain trees and other vegetation, and directly provides grant funding for them to advance that work. Most of the funding that it administers comes through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), dollars that require dedicating staffing support at the state level to secure. Since 2008, the department has administered close to 250 grants intended to increase urban tree canopy in jurisdictions of all sizes throughout Washington.

But the supplemental two-year budget released earlier this week by House leaders would zero out funding for urban forestry.

“It’s not a reduction per se, it’s an elimination of a program,” Will Rubin, Communications Manager for DNR’s Forest Resilience Division, told The Urbanist.

Some of the projects enabled via the UCF program over the past few years include installation of a rain garden with new tree plantings at the Title I First Creek Middle School in Tacoma in 2019, workforce training that resulted in the planting of 400 native plants and removal of invasive species in South King County in 2023, the planting of 302 trees in downtown Snoqualmie in 2024, and the creation of an invasive plant and pest management plan in Mason County in 2024.

Not only would the elimination of DNR’s program make it much harder for these communities to access federal tree funding in the future, zeroing out the program right now could require those local partners to pay back any funds tied to work that isn’t able to be wrapped up by the time the state budget takes effect on July 1.

“There’s about $5.5 million of active pass-through funding out there, federal funds that the state has passed through to these communities. Those are executed projects, those are executed agreements, and cutting this program would call into question the future of those executed projects,” Rubin said. “[If] we don’t have the staff to do that work, then that work’s not getting done. So, it’s not exactly an unfunded mandate that can be accomplished without funds. It’s not like we can move these people into wildfire [division at DNR] to have them do the work over there. So, it’s an existential proposal that way.”

The Urbanist reached out to House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34th, West Seattle) and Appropriations Committee Chair Timm Ormsby (D-3rd, Spokane) for a comment on these potential cuts, but neither were available for an interview ahead of the publication of this story. The House’s proposed budget still needs to be reconciled with the version advanced by the state Senate before the end of the legislative session on March 12.

In the wake of the 2021 heat dome event in Washington, in which dangerously high temperatures resulted in at least 159 excess injury deaths over the course of three sweltering weeks in June and July, there’s been increased attention on the role that urban trees play on temperature control.

Tree canopy counteracts the urban heat island effect, which drives temperatures up in cities, largely due to the heat absorbing qualities of pavement and concrete. Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color tend to be the most lacking in tree canopy and bear the brunt of urban heat as a result. A 2019 study focused on Madison, Wisconsin found that an urban tree canopy that reaches 40% maximizes the amount of cooling that occurs during high-temperature events — reducing temperatures by as much as seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit.

“The science is clear on the need for more of a urban tree canopy as far as heat islands and mitigation for climate change and making sure that some of our most vulnerable populations are able to benefit from our urban tree canopy, so those frontline communities would be directly impacted,” Snohomish County Councilmember Megan Dunn told The Urbanist.

Dunn is a member of DNR’s Urban Forestry board and has a front-row seat to the types of investments that the state program is able to leverage.

“I know it’s a hard budget year, and these are hard decisions, but eliminating the program is what we’re concerned about. I would understand the need to reduce some of it, but to completely eliminate it, I think is, unfortunately, a short-sighted decision,” Dunn said.

Another city that depends on support from the DNR program is Tacoma. With just 21% of the city’s land covered by trees, Tacoma ranks at the bottom of the list for tree canopy rates across Puget Sound, and is unlikely to meet its goal of achieving 30% tree canopy coverage by 2030. That said, Mike Carey, Tacoma’s Urban Forest Program Manager, told The Urbanist that the impacts of these state cuts would likely fall disproportionately on smaller cities and towns that don’t have their own urban forestry programs.

“The state DNR program is so fantastic in that they get to bridge those jurisdictional gaps, and they get to connect partners. So while I might be doing a project in Tacoma, and somebody might be doing a project in University Place or Federal Way or somewhere that’s surrounding us,” Carey said. “They’ve really been the hub for a lot of the work that’s happening at the state and they have awareness of all of these programs and projects, and they’ve been able to connect community partners to leverage each other. And that, in and of itself, is a huge wealth of knowledge and resource to the State of Washington that would go away.”

In the context of the $79.2 billion operating budget proposed in the House, the cuts being eyed here are not significant, with the program’s ongoing costs totaling just $3 million. But those dollars pay large dividends across the state and almost certainly bring in more dollars from outside the state than what it costs to administer.

“The grant money that we receive from the state isn’t necessarily a huge amount of money, but we’re using that to amplify our own funds, our own partnerships locally and community based organizations work,” Carey said. “And so it’s not just the money that’s being redacted, it’s the leveraging of local grant resources and local dollars as well. And that capacity just goes away with this too. And so it’s so much more than just what the state is looking to remove.”

Along with these proposed cuts, House Democrats are also poised to divert more than $300 million from the Climate Commitment Act — dollars that had been poised to fund clean energy, flood resilience programs, or public transit — in order to backfill a the state’s Working Families Tax Credit. All of this is happening in the shadow of climate denial at the federal level, with the Trump administration increasingly abandoning climate work. Many environmental advocates have pointed to that fact in pushing officials to do even more at the state level to combat climate change.

“At a time when we’re seeing longer summers, hotter summers, events like the heat dome, we can’t afford to go backwards,” Rubin said. “We can’t afford to just go pretend that urban forestry doesn’t exist, and it would have a long, run on effect with communities up and down the I-5 corridor, [and] across the state. You don’t need to be an ‘urban area’, like a Seattle or Tacoma or an Olympia or a Yakima or Spokane, to have urban forests.”

The post ‘Existential’ Budget Cut Would Wipe Out State Urban Forestry Program first appeared on The Urbanist.

SB 6026, introduced by Senator Emily Alvarado (D-34th, West Seattle) and requested by Governor Bob Ferguson, is geared toward jumpstarting redevelopment of underutilized commercial properties in cities across the state. In its original form, on top of requiring cities to allow residential uses in all commercial zones, it would have also banned those local governments from requiring housing projects in those areas to come with ground-floor storefronts or commercial spaces.

It’s the ban on requiring storefronts that likely would pack the biggest punch in the bill, with analysis conducted by the Puget Sound Regional Council earlier this year concluding that only 5% of the eligible parcels around the state currently prohibit residential uses outright. But concerns have been raised at the local level around potentially losing the opportunity to create more truly mixed-use districts in some of Washington’s fastest growing cities.

The officials making their voices heard Olympia seeking changes to SB 6026 have been from some of the most pro-housing jurisdictions in Puget Sound, including Bothell, Redmond, and Kirkland, and are asking legislators to not get in the way of their momentum when it comes to densifying.

A major fear is having blank facades where there could be active storefronts, giving pedestrians little reason to walk down a corridor. The upside? Allowing builders to make use of less expensive housing construction types, with ground floor retail requirements often forcing the same type of buildings that feature wood-frame upper stories over one or two stories of concrete.

As SB 6026 advanced through the Senate, exemptions were added that would have retained the ability for cities to require ground-floor commercial in certain places. That list included all areas close to light rail and bus rapid transit stops as laid out in the 2025 transit-oriented development bill, within business improvement areas (BIAs), and along designated “Main Streets” as administered by the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. Essentially, that provided a top-down designation of which areas of the state were more important to maintain walkability and areas where that is seen as less of a priority.

Instead, the version approved by the House’s local government committee will cap the number of areas covered by the bill where local cities can require ground-floor retail at 40%. Fully subsidized affordable housing projects would continue to be exempt from any retail requirements at all, on top of any areas covered by the transit-oriented development.

“The bill as it came over to the Senate seemed to me overly complicated, and there were a lot of exemptions in it,” Representative Davina Duerr (D-1st, Bothell), the local government committee’s chair, said in introducing the revamped version of the bill. Duerr, a former Bothell Councilmember, described trying to find a way to placate local officials while still maintaining the bill’s intent.

“I felt like [King] Solomon, in a way, because I really believe that we need more housing, and I completely understand the need to have more flexibility and more area available for housing,” Duerr continued. “But also, with my city background, I understand the need and the wanting to create walkable communities, the ability to raise sales tax — given the 1% property tax cap — and so what I’ve tried to do with this amendment is get rid of the exemptions and provide more flexibility by changing it to a 40% number that cities can mandate the ground floor retail. So it doesn’t make everyone happy, but I feel like it provides more flexibility for cities.”

The same committee did reject an amendment reducing the number of cities where the bill would apply, keeping the floor at 30,000 residents.

SB 6026 is one of this year’s highest profile housing bills, in the wake of major zoning reforms adopted by the legislature in recent years including the Middle Housing Law, parking reform and the transit-oriented development bill. Its inspiration seems to be California’s AB 2011, and its backers include former Governor Chris Gregoire, who is close with Governor Ferguson, and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Both figures are active in the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, a thinktank that regularly weighs in on housing policy and has been promoting the idea of creating “Grand Boulevards” along the state’s busiest roadways.

In Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond, one of the fastest growing cities on the Eastside, local officials have been pushing back vociferously on the bill, arguing that it would make it harder for the city to make room for small businesses that are getting displaced as properties redevelop. Earlier this month, Carol Helland, Redmond’s Planning & Community Development Director pushed for significant changes in the bill to allow their city to continue to build out walkable neighborhoods near its popular light rail stations.

“Cities like Redmond have proactively upzoned and exceeded housing targets. However, redevelopment is already displacing small, locally owned businesses at a rate that available commercial space cannot absorb. Limiting a city’s ability to require ground floor retail outside of station areas will make it even harder to retain these small businesses,” Hellend said. “Ground floor retail requirements are not about restricting housing. They’re about creating complete walkable community and small business can coexist. The legislature has encouraged this type of planning through recent mandates, requiring a climate change element, mandating density around transit development areas and increasing residential capacity in neighborhoods. Redmond has been an early adopter of all of these requirements, and this bill will undercut much of our work.”

The new 40% cap likely gives cities the flexibility to decide which areas within their borders are the most important when it comes to maintaining walkability, especially in a city like Redmond where so many existing mixed-use zones are close to light rail stations where storefront mandates would be unimpacted. But if not, they can simply provide height incentives that allow builders to reach 85 feet, another provision embedded within the House version.

Housing advocates were hopeful some of the reduced requirements for ground-floor retail could be balanced out by the passage of statewide neighborhood cafe and corner store legalization bill, but that policy stalled out for a third year in a row, once again dying in the Senate’s local government committee.

Ultimately, SB 6026 is trying to lower barriers that stand in the way of housing production, though it mostly maintains the status quo of zoning in Washington, encouraging development in areas that are already mostly zoned for apartment buildings and leaving the state’s residential areas off-limits.

“As a city councilmember for Olympia, I have seen what happens to this commercial land that has big open spaces,” Representative Lisa Parshley (D-22) said ahead of the committee vote. “For example, our mall has at peak occupancy, more than three-quarters of the parking lot empty, and we are running out of buildable land. We need to be able to do this, and some cities are working towards it, and unfortunately, some are not, and we have a housing crisis.”

SB 6026 has to clear the House appropriations committee, the House floor, and then have the changes made in the House signed off by the full Senate before the end of the legislative session on March 12.

This article has been updated to clarify that transit station areas would continue to be exempt from the provisions around ground floor retail.

The post Legislation Targeting Ground-Floor Storefronts Gets Overhauled in House first appeared on The Urbanist.

On top of $1.215 billion for highway and bridge maintenance and preservation, the new bonding would unlock $225 million for maintenance on deteriorating highway facilities like buildings and vehicle yards, and $100 million for maintenance work at Washington State Ferries.

An additional $100 million would go toward highway overhauls on the state’s “high risk corridors,” the surface highways where a disproportionate number of fatal and serious injury crashes take place. While that money wouldn’t be committed until the 2029-2031 biennium, it would double a $100 million that has already been committed to safety-related upgrades starting in 2027.

The backing for this new debt would come from a slate of funding sources that the legislature approved in 2025, including a 6-cent increase to the state gas tax, higher rental car fees, a luxury vehicle sales tax, and a 3% charge for credit card transactions on ferries. Along with a need to make up for declining fuel usage, those increases were largely approved to accommodate cost increases on a handful of highway expansion projects across the state, including the 520 bridge replacement project, the North Spokane Corridor, and the twin highway extensions between Seattle and Tacoma that have been dubbed the Puget Sound Gateway.

It’s highway projects like those that have caused basic highway maintenance to take a back seat in state transportation budgets over the past few decades, leading to the need to invest $8 billion over the next 10 years in order to keep the state system in a state-of-good repair. These new dollars will make a dent in that deficit, but at a cost of increased interest payments for future transportation budget writers.

“The supplemental budget focuses fundamentally on three core priorities: preservation and maintenance of our transportation system, safety on our system, and creating jobs across Washington state,” transportation committee chair Marko Liias (D-21st, Mukilteo) told reporters in a briefing minutes after the budget was posted online. “We are focused both on preservation maintenance of our state highways and our state bridges. We are also focused on preservation and maintenance of our state ferries, and then we’re also focused on dealing with the unprecedented damage caused by the flood event last fall, both at the state and local level.”

Debt service already eats up nearly 12% of the state’s transportation budget, more than the combined operating and capital budgets for the entire Washington State Ferries system. Despite the fact that the bill authorizing the new bonds is set to get a vote on Thursday in committee, as of Monday, the bill did not yet have a fiscal note attached to it that could give the public a sense of how much higher that number might potentially climb.

A plan to divert 0.1% of the state’s 6.5% sales tax into the transportation budget, also approved last year, will stay in place under the Senate’s proposal and be further established in state law by permanently dedicating a “significant portion” of that sales tax to state ferries. That tax diversion, which grabs funding that might otherwise fund schools and social services, has been causing heartburn among legislators.

The House budget, also released Monday, rejects the idea of issuing new debt. Without that new money, it includes much fewer sweeping changes to the budget the legislature approved last year, though it would add $770 million for maintenance and preservation leveraged using the state’s existing bonding capacity.

“We don’t need to authorize more bonds to invest more in preservation and maintenance; at least, not now,” House transportation chair Representative Jay Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) said in a release Monday. “By using existing bond capacity and smoothing funds across biennia, we are able to add $335 [million] to preservation and maintenance this biennium, and $435 [million] in 2027-29. Bonding can help deliver major infrastructure projects, but it must be used carefully. We need to look at funding decisions across the entire biennium and ensure we’re not over-committing future budgets.” 

After years of warnings from previous state transportation secretaries about budget writers’ lack of attention on preserving deteriorating highways, Ferguson has jumped on the issue since taking office in 2025. His office has seized on recent emergency closures like the shuttering of the Carbon River Bridge near Mount Rainer and the temporary closure of the White River bridge along State Route 410 to make the case that the state needs to be doing more to invest in basic maintenance, but Ferguson has not called for significantly reprioritizing spending decisions that have already been made.

The bond proposal allowed the new Governor to mostly evade that issue, while he has supported keeping highway expansion projects like the North Spokane Corridor on track during his first 14 months in office.

Transit funding is essentially a footnote in either chamber’s budget, though the legislature is advancing a proposal to allow Sound Transit to lean more heavily on debt as well, extending bond terms to 75 years for some of the agency’s most long-lasting assets.

The Senate proposal did ditch Ferguson’s idea of issuing another $1 billion in debt to accelerate construction on three new vehicle ferries for the state fleet. Liias defended the move as one that will allow the state to focus on delivery of the three new boats that are currently on order, when Ferguson’s proposal would have gotten six into the queue.

“When we look at this, between now and 2031, we feel like the budget has a lot of ferry construction work in it. As we come back in 2027, we’re going to have to talk about what steps we take beyond the first three [boats] but for the supplemental [budget] we’re focused on fully funding the first three vessels. That’s our priority,” Liias said. The governor presented a ten-year plan, so he did talk about those next vessels. I think I see a lot of merit in his proposal, but we want to sort of take more time on figuring out those next steps.”

Liias also defended a pivot away from supplemental passenger ferry service funding, which the legislature had invested in as the state ferry fleet rebounded from the depths of the pandemic. While temporary funding was provided to King County to help continue mid-day and Saturday service to Vashon Island, the Kitsap Transit fast ferry between Bremerton and Downtown Seattle no longer operates on Saturdays through the offseason.

“Because we’re now at full operating capability — obviously, occasionally there’s some hiccups when we have vessels that hit logs and things like that, but generally speaking — the system, absent that Sidney run, is at full domestic service,” Liias said. “And so for that reason, our commitment was that once we got full domestic service restored, that those sort of temporary relief mechanisms would go away. We’re continuing forward with that policy.”

Last year, the Mosquito Fleet Act, a bill from Representative Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island) that would have empowered local governments to take actions to fund passenger-only ferry systems on their own, died without getting a vote in Liias’s committee. Nance has been undertaking a second push to get that bill through, with a pivotal hearing this Friday back in the same committee.

Both the House and the Senate transportation committees are set to approve their respective budgets by the end of this week, with a conference committee to reconcile the two proposals almost certain to come after that. The final proposal will need a vote before the legislature adjourns for the year on March 12.

The post State Senate Signs Onto Billions of New Debt for Highway Upkeep first appeared on The Urbanist.

King County is staring down a fiscal cliff that threatens to dismantle the services our communities rely on most. We are facing a projected General Fund shortfall of roughly $150 million for the 2026-2027 biennium, and this is not a result of mismanagement or a temporary glitch. It is a structural failure that has been manufactured by the state.

For decades, the arbitrary 1% cap on property tax revenue growth has strangled our ability to keep up with basic costs. While inflation and population growth have soared, our revenue has been artificially suppressed. We are being asked to run a 2026 county on a 2001 revenue model, and the math simply does not work without new tools.

This is why the state legislature must pass House Bill 2442.

For over a decade, local leaders have been asking for the authority to do more than the incremental 0.01% tax increases we are currently limited to. We have been asking for the toolbox to fix our own house. HB 2442 grants us that authority and allows local governments to explore new revenue options, such as utility taxes or expanded excise taxes, that can actually keep pace with the cost of providing services.

As a Port Commissioner and a candidate for King County Council District 2, I see clearly that our values of equity and justice are facing a mathematical reality check. To the readers of The Urbanist who understand that density and transit must be paired with robust public services, I want to be clear that HB 2442 is not a silver bullet. It will not solve every financial woe overnight. But it provides the one thing King County has been begging for, which is flexibility.

The state should understand the need to plug a critical funding hole, as they’re fighting right now to pass the Millionaire Tax in order to help fill their own deficit. It is long overdue that the wealthiest among us pay their fair share to fund our schools and statewide infrastructure. But, a state wealth tax fixes the state’s budget deficit; it does not automatically fill the hole in King County’s General Fund. We cannot wait for a trickle-down solution from Olympia to save our local clinics, our public defenders, our transit operators, and the vital services we depend upon. 

We need both solutions: We need the state to fix its own regressive tax code, and we also need it to pass HB 2442 and let King County save itself.

If the legislature doesn’t pass HB 2442, the county won’t just face trimming fat. It would mean scaling back public health services in a post-pandemic world and the loss of vital jobs supporting our most vulnerable residents. The status quo, one-size-fits-all tax cap is suffocating the economic engine of Washington State. We have the solutions, and we have the political will locally to make hard choices and invest in our future and workforce. What we lack is permission.

I urge the legislature to move HB 2442 forward immediately. Let us build a budget that reflects our values, protects our workers, and ensures that King County remains a place where working families can not only survive but thrive.

Send public comment to state legislators and track bill progress on the HB 2442 page.

The post Op-Ed: Why HB 2442 is a Lifeline for Cash-Strapped King County first appeared on The Urbanist.

A similar, but more direct attempt at state building code reform died abruptly last year.

SB 5156, sponsored by Senator Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), has been significantly revamped after running into opposition in the state House in 2025. While the version greenlit by the Senate’s housing committee last year had included explicit direction to the state Department of Labor & Industries to revamp standards for elevators, the new version instead directs the state’s building code council to tackle the issue as part of their 2027 code update. In a compromise, the bill still includes explicit language to legalize smaller elevators that still meet the federal minimum for accessibility in buildings with up to 24 units or six stories.

It’s that provision that is the heart of the bill, creating an incentive for builders to stack units on top of one another without having to spring for a full elevator or being pushed to build no elevator at all. The change is meant to build on other reforms approved by the legislature in recent years, including another major change already being considered by the building code council that would legalize Seattle’s wildly successful single-stair regulations across the entire state.

“This is a bill that I think fits within the abundance agenda that you hear about so commonly. This is an innovation in housing to go along with the bill that we passed a few years ago allowing single-stair apartments on single lots,” Solomon said on the Senate floor Friday. “This bill is a supplement that says that in these smaller apartment buildings, you don’t have to have a gigantic elevator like we require now in the United States. In Europe, they have smaller sized elevators.”

Regulations unique to the U.S. and Canada that tightly clamp down on what elevators look like and how they can be maintained are increasingly attracting notice in the housing reform world. In 2024, the Center for Building in North America released a 122-page report detailing the factors that force elevators in North America to be much more expensive — and rare — than in other parts of the world.

“The price to install an elevator in a new mid-rise building in the United States or Canada is now at least three times the cost in Western Europe or East Asia. Ongoing expenses like service contracts, periodic inspections, repairs, and modernizations are just as overpriced,” the report noted. “High-income countries with strong labor movements and high safety standards from South Korea to Switzerland have found ways to install wheelchair-accessible elevators in mid-rise apartment buildings for around $50,000 each, even after adjusting for America’s typically higher general price levels. In the United States and Canada, on the other hand, these installations start at around $150,000 in even low-cost areas.”

One major factor behind that disparity: U.S. elevators are required to be large enough to accommodate a full-sized stretcher for emergencies. In contrast, elevators elsewhere in the world are only required to accommodate a seated wheelchair user. But another major component is the incredibly limited elevator installation and repair market, which essentially operates as an oligopoly across North America and pushed back on reforms that could ultimately result in more elevators being built.

Last year, the union that represents those mechanics came out against SB 5156, with Lindsay LaBrosse, business representative for IUEC Local 19, asserting that the proposal would be “skirting important safety requirements.” Those concerns played a big part in the proposal being shelved, despite the fact that the U.S. is not a world leader when it comes to elevator safety. However, those same groups are likely to represent the biggest hurdle to the bill’s other provisions: asking the building code council to look at aligning Washington’s elevator regulations with global standards, a move that would be a sea change for any U.S. state.

“It shall be the intent of the state building code council and the department of labor and industries to support national and international standards harmonization efforts in order to foster the most competitive elevator sector possible, improve the affordability of elevators, and minimize modifications to model codes that increase costs,” the text of SB 5156 states.

According to Stephen Jacob Smith, the Center for Building in North America’s Executive Director, the reforms Washington is considering could unlock tens of thousands of dollars of savings for a small apartment building, especially if the building code council is able to make headway on costly requirements to include two-way video screens in every elevator.

An issue that few people were talking about in the housing space just a few years ago, elevator reform even made it onto the City of Seattle’s official legislative agenda for 2026, thanks to an amendment from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck approved in December.

“This [bill], it maps really well to what we’ve been trying to do with the Comprehensive Plan, when we’re talking about a stacked flat strategy, really empowering and making sure that we are able to have more middle housing that allows for aging in place by making it easier to have more elevators go into middle housing options,” Rinck said in explaining how SB 5156 would supplement Seattle’s newly approved housing reforms.

The path for SB 5156 through the House won’t necessarily be a cakewalk, but the changes made to the bill since last year seem to have placated opposition within the Democratic caucus. Last year, Senators Javier Valdez (D-46th, Seattle), Tina Orwall (D-33rd, SeaTac), and Vandana Slatter (D-48th, Redmond) — legislators not known for maverick stances — voted against the bill on the Senate floor. But with the changes made this year, all three changed their position and voted yes.

Whether the bill is able to make it across the finish line this year or not, it’s clear that overhauling Washington’s outdated elevator standards is an issue that won’t be going away any time soon.

The post Washington’s Elevator Reform Bill Rises Again first appeared on The Urbanist.

But civil rights, privacy, and LGBTQ+ advocates say the bill doesn’t take the right approach to protecting minors’ mental health and keeping them safe. In encouraging companies to implement age verification systems to gatekeep their platforms, the bill opens a can of worms about the increased risk and difficulty these systems will cause to many marginalized people, as well as raising the more fundamental question of who is allowed to access the internet at all. 

“First, it will ban addictive algorithms for minors so they don’t get so easily hooked. And second, it will prohibit push notifications during school hours and late at night,” Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown said in an Instagram video explaining the bill. “And I know as a parent of two kids that those are the most susceptible times to some of the online behavior.”

Brown’s office specifically requested that the legislature advance HB 1834, which has been dubbed “Protecting Washington Children Online.”

“We have a plethora of documents that have been surfaced from our online services that are engaging with constant feeds and constant scrolling opportunities, including ads and other content, including ones that talk about causing reward deficit disorder, dopamine hits in teens that are undeniable, biological and psychological and the top down directives that drive all towards making sure people are coming back for more,” Callan said.

Maya Morales, founder of Washington People’s Privacy, said laws like these are extremely troubling for democracy. 

“The stated intention of these laws when they were originally pushed federally and across states was to remove the last bastions and shreds of the massive democratizing effect a free and open internet has had on our world,” Washington People’s Privacy wrote in a statement. “It’s undeniable that access to a free and open internet has empowered people’s movements, people’s speech rights, climate justice, LGBTQ+ visibility and rights, people’s education efforts, people’s ability to connect and communicate privately and securely, and even the ability of people to orchestrate uprisings and protest under authoritarian rule.”

In addition to civil rights advocates, tech lobbyists oppose the bill, as do some parental rights advocates and smaller tech companies who might not be able to afford to implement an age verification system sufficient to avoid litigation.

Opponents of the bill agree that children should be protected while online, but not through requiring age verification, or even incentivizing age verification. This distinction is crucial for understanding the arguments for and against HB 1834.

Advocates also have concerns that disallowing an algorithmic feed for minors, as HB 1834 does, will impede young people’s ability to discover relevant content on social media platforms.

The concerns around age verification for internet usage

Advocates have many concerns around the possible implementation of age verification requirements for using the internet. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote that age-verification systems are “at their core, surveillance systems.” Among the myriad of problems and risks of age verification systems, the EFF lists: 

• Loss of anonymity, ranging from journalistic sources to whistleblowers to domestic violence survivors.
• Loss of access to the internet for anyone without a legal ID, credit cards, or mortgage information, which disproportionately affects people of color, immigrants, unhoused people, and poor people.
• Higher error rates for age inference facial recognition for people of color, people with disabilities, and transgender people.
• Young people’s, and especially young LGBTQ+ young people’s, loss of access to vital information and affinity communities. 
• Increased privacy risks around sensitive data such as ID photos and biometric data that could be obtained through data breaches or sold to data brokers and marketers.
• Loss of access to, and the chilling of, freedom of speech.

There is a particularly increased risk to transgender people being forced to engage with these systems in order to use the internet. An estimated 43% of voting-eligible transgender Americans don’t possess IDs that correctly reflect their name and gender. 

The Greater Seattle Business Association (GBSA) wrote a letter opposing HB 1834 because it “would have unintended consequences for LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable young people who rely on social media for critical community support, a sense of belonging, and lifesaving educational resources.”

Proponents of HB 1834 argue that the bill won’t cause these harms because it doesn’t legally require age verification. The legislation states that tech companies must “reasonably determine” a user isn’t a minor instead of having the “actual knowledge” that would mandate measures like ID or biometric checks. 

“Our bill does not require age verification,” said Mike Faulk, the deputy communications officer at the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “These companies can ‘reasonably determine’ age using the copious amounts of data they already collect from people. The bill does not ask, nor do we want, the companies to collect any additional data. We are bringing an amendment to strengthen data protection elements in the bill and are open to more.”

However, the EFF wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission about a federal bill with similar language, stating their fear that this language would nevertheless lead to age verification gates. 

“Litigation-averse companies are likely to implement some kind of age-verification process to avoid running afoul of the law,” the EFF wrote. 

Tee Sannon, the ACLU of Washington’s Technology Policy Program Director, said that HB 1834 would lead to the implementation of age-verification systems. 

“We all share the goal of protecting minors online, but age verification online is not the right solution,” Sannon told The Urbanist. “By requiring platforms to ‘reasonably determine’ whether users are minors, HB1834 will drive increased data collection and create new privacy risks for everyone.”

Sannon also warned that age-verification systems often involve third-party vendors that add another layer of vulnerability when considering data security risks. 

Gabriel Neuman, director of policy & advocacy at GBSA, also warned that not all requirements stipulated in bills are actually verified or enforced. One example is mandating that tech companies not retain any age verification data they collect.

“Many pieces of legislation contain requirements that corporations not hold onto verification data, but there is no way to ensure they actually do that, and they have been caught keeping that data in the past,” Neuman told The Urbanist. 

The legislature was considering another bill this session – HB 2112 – that explicitly required age verification. Brought forward by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, Tacoma), the bill was meant to protect minors from sexual material that is harmful to them. 

Aside from the clear data privacy risks, a bill like HB 2112 would allow lawmakers to define exactly what material is deemed “harmful,” which could be so broad as to include all LGTBQ+ content, sexual education content, and information about reproductive care. A similar power of determination has led to the recent escalation in book banning across the country. 

 “LGBTQ youth already face high rates of depression and isolation for many, especially in rural areas and in unsupportive homes,” Danielle Skeany, the executive director of Gender Justice League said during testimony. “Online communities are their lifeline, and this bill would cut off that lifeline.”

HB 2112 didn’t make it through the policy committee cut-off date, meaning it’s dead for the session. But the fact that it was brought forward at all, and might be revived during a future year, troubles some advocates.

“We talked to national experts doing this work, and they were surprised that 2112 was even put forward and given a hearing in Washington state,” said Oliver Miska, the government relations specialist for Lavender Rights Project. “They were even more surprised that it was supported by Democrats.”

Adding further grist to the mill is the possibility that age verification systems might not even work as designed. Although more research is needed, a March 2025 pre-print suggests that when faced with these systems, many users pivot, either by using a virtual private network (VPN) to mask their location in order to bypass relevant laws or by using websites that aren’t compliant with the laws. 

Recent trends in age verification

The last few years have seen a push towards age verification on the internet, not only in the United States but also in Europe and Australia. That being said, it is difficult to compare age verification laws in other countries to those in the U.S. since many countries have much stricter privacy laws.

Similar age verification laws in other states have faced legal challenges. HB 1834 is modeled after a California law that survived the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals but is still facing legal action from big tech companies Meta, Google, and TikTok. 

This week, popular online communications app Discord announced a default teen-friendly space rolling out in March, with an age verification process for users who want to retain full site functionality. Some adults will have their age automatically estimated through Discord’s age inference model, while other users will be asked to submit either a video or a form of identification. 

One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers suffered a data breach just last fall that compromised age verification data, including images of government-issued IDs. 

Age verification laws in Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming restrict social media service Blueksky users from accessing their direct messages unless they engage in an age verification process that could involve official ID, credit card verification, or social security number checks. A similar law in Mississippi caused Bluesky to cease operations entirely in the state for several months last year before reopening at the end of the year.

On Tuesday, the State of New Mexico brought Meta to trial for allegedly failing to protect children on its platform from sexual exploitation. New Mexico’s Attorney General wrote that he wants Meta to start using age verification. 

Some privacy and LGBTQ+ advocates see this recent push for age verification as an example of a moral panic. 

“Personally, I think this is an extension of the purity culture that is gaining popularity in the United States – age verification requirements are a way for legislators to keep kids away from content they deem inappropriate. It can also be a way for them to implement their version of morality,” Gabriel Neuman, director of policy & advocacy at GBSA, told The Urbanist. “‘Protecting kids’ is a dog whistle that has been used against the LGBTQ+ community for generations.” 

During the hearing for HB 2112, Miska drew a direct parallel between laws requiring age verification and the MAGA agenda. 

“We don’t have a clear and safe way to do age verification software. We just don’t,” Miska testified. “Unfortunately, this bill is a page from Project 2025. It’s reminiscent of 19th century obscenity laws that would use vague definitions to target LGBT community and culture.”

Project 2025 implies that all LGBTQ+ content, and specifically any transgender content, should be classified as pornography, which should be outlawed, including imprisonment for its creators and distributors. 

Washington People’s Privacy links these age verification laws to the movement to undermine democracy. 

“The Heritage Foundation and other ultra-to-moderate right wing groups realized that the key to seizing authoritarian power and tight global control of all our earth’s resources was to begin by decimating any possibility of anonymity and privacy online,” Washington People’s Privacy wrote in their statement. 

The timing of the introduction of HB 1834 and other age verification-related bills in the state legislature cannot be divorced from the concurrent attacks on LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights, the media, higher education, and the U.S. Constitution.

The larger political context may encourage lawmakers to think creatively while developing other options for keeping kids, as well as adults, safe from the addictive algorithms used in social media. 

“There are better approaches, such as extending strong privacy and safety protections to all users without forcing age determination,” Sannon said. “We can protect minors online without expanding surveillance or undermining anonymity.” 

Washington People’s Privacy offered several ideas for legislation they said would be more effective, including “a people-first universal data privacy law,” bans on the collection of sensitive personal data, data minimization regulations, a law that would prohibit state and local law enforcement from buying sensitive data from data brokers without a warrant (modeled after the federal Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act), and tech education classes for kids and their families.  

Legislators have recently added two amendments to HB 1834 for consideration, but advocates say neither sufficiently addresses their concerns. 

HB 1834 could be pulled for a House floor vote at any time. Should that vote succeed, the legislation would go to the Senate to reconcile any differences between HB 1834 and the bill the Senate passed last year. 

Correction: this story has been updated with a statement from the Washington Attorney General’s Office that was not included in its initial version due to an editing error.

The post Washington Legislature Toys with Age Verification for Big Tech first appeared on The Urbanist.

Despite receiving voter approval to build its projects — which are deemed essential public facilities under state law — Sound Transit regularly runs into delays when it comes to local permit approval. Those delays, which have been most acute in cities where local leaders have been either hostile or indifferent to participating in the expansion of the regional transit network, have added years to Sound Transit projects, which in turn translates to wasted dollars as inflation makes projects more expensive. That’s a problem that a pair of bills that advanced this week aim to address.

House Bill 2517, and its companion Senate Bill 6309, wouldn’t completely change the game when it comes to Sound Transit’s need to get local approval to build its projects. But they would remove hurdles that don’t align with Sound Transit’s unique status as an agency working across multiple jurisdictions.

Currently, the agency isn’t allowed to apply for construction or technical permits that impact properties that Sound Transit doesn’t yet control, despite the fact that eminent domain authority means that it’s only a matter of time before those properties get transferred over. Without authority to start submitting permits, Sound Transit can be held up by a small number of property owners pushing back.

The bills also grant Sound Transit the ability to start applying for construction permits before a local government makes an official land use decision — permits that would then be in the queue to be approved when everything is ultimately greenlit. Guardrails added via amendments this week would ensure that property owners are notified when Sound Transit submits a permit related to their property.

“The biggest thrust of this bill is to try to make sure that some of those processes can happen concurrently and not sequentially. When there’s so many boxes that you have to check to get something like this built, it can really drag out the timelines in an extraordinary way if they all have to happen sequentially,” said Representative Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34th, West Seattle), the prime sponsor of the bill’s House version, last month in presenting it to the local government committee. “The goal here is, when we have a tens of billions of dollars, multi-generational investment, let’s be as efficient as possible, and how government lets other governments build infrastructure that we hope will a big difference for the economic connectivity of the Seattle metropolitan area for generations to come.”

With these updates to state law, Sound Transit would also be able to override local development standards that weren’t built with light rail in mind, including height limits and setback requirements, as long as the agency “complies with those development regulations to the extent practicable.” Those development regulations often create a hodgepodge of bespoke requirements that require significant resources for Sound Transit to navigate. In Seattle, for example, special legislation had to be crafted unifying development standards for light rail in anticipation of the city’s next two projects to Ballard and West Seattle, which collectively will pass through 19 different zones, each with unique standards.

Sound Transit representative Mike Shaw, speaking to the House local government committee last month, estimated that the changes taken as a whole could save the agency up to nine months on some of its projects, a total that would likely translate into tens of millions of dollars saved.

“We’re hoping to save us some money, be a little easier on our partners, and get the service going faster,” Shaw said.

Many Puget Sound transit advocates have urged the legislature to go much further and grant Sound Transit its own permitting authority, a move that would significantly diminish the role local governments play in enabling transit projects.

“Ultimately, local permitting processes do not add much value to Sound Transit projects. More often than not, they simply slow projects down — sometimes to a near-halt — and heap new costs onto Sound Transit,” The Urbanist‘s senior reporter Stephen Fesler wrote in an 2024 op-ed in advocating for bolder permitting reform. “The agency already has comprehensive design and construction standards and voters have repeatedly approved Sound Transit expansion projects, giving their consent to the full scope of the Sound Transit 2 and 3 programs. There’s no reason to keep bogging down agency capital expansion programs.”

But with the work of Sound Transit so bound up with that of local government — all of the members of the Sound Transit board are local elected officials, except for the state transportation secretary — and the revolving door between the state legislature and municipal leadership so active, such a major move remains a pipe dream under today’s political reality.

So far, the votes on these bills have been closely divided along party lines, with any direct animus for Sound Transit from Republican lawmakers being couched behind concerns over impacting private property rights. “I do believe the private property owner is still the one left holding the bag here,” Rep. Dan Griffey (R-35th, Allyn). “I get what Sound Transit’s trying to do and why they want to do it. My problem is, I don’t think there’s enough protection for the private property ownership rights. I think they’re going to get railroaded in this.”

Far from a sea change, these reforms likely represent the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to getting Sound Transit out of the permitting fray — with the question of how much money could have been saved if these reforms were enacted sooner lingering in the air.

“With increasing growth in Puget Sound and strong ridership recovery since the pandemic, we must deliver transit expansion as fast as possible. The people are asking for it. Sound Transit’s role in providing additional transportation options in our region is a vital element to addressing our gridlock and our system resilience,” Tacoma Councilmember and Sound Transit board member Kristina Walker told the Senate’s local government committee in supporting the proposal. “Senate Bill 6309 is a tremendous step in the right direction towards efficiently delivering regional transportation, specifically transit investments, ensuring our communities have access to jobs, schools and services they deserve.”

These bills aren’t the only pieces of legislation that Sound Transit is banking on this session to help the agency advance its portfolio of projects. SB 6148 would let Sound Transit issue bonds that are much longer than the ones it has relied on in the past, with terms as long as 75 years. That idea is getting mixed reception among transit advocates, wary of adding on the cost of additional debt service to the agency’s financial plan — dollars that will ultimately be paid back by future generations.

The post Olympia Seeks to Boost Sound Transit with Long Overdue Permit Reforms first appeared on The Urbanist.