The legislative deadpool
Odd tax votes, farm worker rights, toxic tires, political violence, and some shameless sports pandering.
The first legislative cutoffs of the short 2026 session kindled and killed dreams, and simplified the lives of legislative staff, lobbyists and watchers, yours included. Big fiscal decisions remain, including many revenue bills to close the roughly $2.3 billion budget deficit, and some that would make the hole bigger.
As the legislative session nears its third inning, here’s a rundown of the legislative living and deadpool items that raised our eyebrows.
What did survive…
A stealth rollback of last year’s big bump in the estate tax
We’re always on the watch for consequential legislation — AKA things with really big price tags — moving fast and quiet. And so we call your attention to Senate Bill 6347, which has an unusually clear title: “Undoing recent changes to the estate tax.” The measure, sponsored by Sen. Claudia Kauffman, D-Kent, would roll back last year’s big tax increase on very wealthy people who leave this life and pass their stuff on to their heirs. That measure, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson with great fanfare last spring, jacked the top rate on the estate tax from 20% — already tied for the highest in the country — to a whopping 35%. It also tossed some tax relief to the merely affluent by increasing the portion of your estate that is exempt from the tax to $3M.
That change is worth about $200 million per year to the state’s bottom line, at least in theory.1 It was hailed as one of the only truly progressive elements of the massive tax package lawmakers adopted last year.
Here’s where we get to the fast and quiet part. The new bill was introduced on Feb. 4. A brief public hearing was held on Feb. 6 in the Senate Ways & Means Committee, at which exactly nobody testified pro or con. On Wednesday, it passed out of committee with zero debate on a very unusual bipartisan vote that included all the majority Republicans. Three Democrats, including Vice Chair Noel Frame, D-Seattle, who is generally in charge of tax legislation for the Senate majority, voted no.
So what the heck is going on? Here’s our guess: Remember that early sunset on the B&O tax surcharge on big business that’s part of the income tax proposal? The one we characterized as a bribe aimed at keeping Big Business on the sidelines during the inevitable repeal initiative campaign? This looks a lot like that, only for very rich individuals. Stretch it over five years, and it looks like $1 billion of that.
PQ
Farmworker collective bargaining
SB 6045, which would give farm workers collective bargaining rights by letting the Public Employment Relations Commission enforce them, is still in the game in the Senate Rules committee. It was recently sliced up by Ways & Means along the way.
The newest version of the bill most notably removes farm labor contractors from the definition of “employer.” That’s a bit of a mouthful, but stay with me. Farm labor contractors are organizations that take care of hiring H-2A workers for farms. Those workers have been getting hired more in Washington, with 28,000 being hired in 2025. That means those contractors won’t be able to be held liable by PERC. Instead, the bill makes whoever hired the farm labor contractor the “employer” for enforcement purposes.
RHM
Banning toxic tires
A bid to kick toxic tires to the curb burned rubber on its way past this week’s fiscal cutoff.
The proposal from Rep. Zach Hall, D-Issaquah, would ban a noxious chemical — 6PPD — from all vehicle tires after 2035. 6PPD is an anti-degradant that gives your tires a longer lifespan. It also degrades into a toxin (6PPD-q) which tends to get mixed into runoff and eventually flows into salmon habitats. The stuff is deadly for the fish even in small amounts so it’s not so great for humans either.
House Bill 2421 would levy fines of up to $5,000 for first-time offenses and up to $10,000 for repeat offenses. It includes carveouts for Uncle Sam’s vehicle fleets — e.g. the FAA, Homeland Security, and NASA.
Environmentalists and local governments hailed the bill as a boon for Mother Nature. Folks in the business of making or selling tires framed it as another irksome expense on their respective industries on top of the state’s tire fee hike last year.2
Cleaner alternatives to 6PPD have begun to roll onto the market, but most haven’t passed federal review or gained a proven track record in the field. Truckers told the House Appropriations Committee this week that the scenario above will likely see them buy 6PPD tires out of state at greater expense.
Hall’s bill is parked in the House Rules Committee where it awaits its next green light.
TG
Protecting lawmakers’ addresses
A well-intended bill by Rep. Liz Berry, D-Seattle, to get ahead of the rising trend of political violence has survived a round of kvetching by archivists, auditors and the press and is sitting in the House Rules committee.
Berry, in response to assassinations on the political left and right last year, and lawmakers’ disturbingly prevalent reports of stalking, would have extended the state’s address confidentiality program to elected officials and law enforcement officials. Her bill would also allow State Patrol security at events.
That’s more complicated than it sounds, because lawmakers in particular have their addresses on a host of documents. The original bill also proposed to restrict journalists from publishing a lawmaker’s address, which raised constitutional problems.
Amendments to the bill resolved that, and sought to ease the burden for the state archives and county officials who record mortgages and such, bringing what sounded like a big fiscal note down to about $650,000 this biennium. It has bipartisan support.
JM
A pass for dirtier power
Spokane is one step closer to buying a local incinerator more time to clean up its act.
A bill from Spokanite House Democrat Natasha Hill would lend the waste-to-energy facility four more years to meet the emissions standards per the state’s Climate Commitment Act. The garbage-intensive site risks paying up to $8 million in yearly penalties by 2027 as it stands now — an amount that threatens to shut the place down entirely.
Hill’s proposal would give the plant until 2030 to start going greener and cut some 20% of its CO2 footprint relative to 2016 base levels. It would have until mid-century to cut its emissions by some 95%.
Cheerleaders for House Bill 2416 contend it would do both workers and Mother Nature a solid by saving all that garbage from being trucked to landfills out-of-county. Greens on the other side of the coin billed it as the dirtiest solution to climate change the state can’t afford.
The state is nowhere close to meeting its climate goals and carveouts like the above will add up.
TG
Freer rein for public transit
Urbanists will find a lot to like about House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon’s bid to give Sound Transit an easy button for permitting public transit projects. Homeowners? Not so much.
House Bill 2517 would let the agency vie for construction or technical permits impacting properties out of its reach. The Burien Democrat’s proposal would also allow it to go hunting for permits before local governments make a formal land use decision. On its face, the bill gives Sound Transit leeway to get everything in order on its end without having to wait on city halls or county councils to take a vote.
Homeowners living on land out of Sound Transit’s control would still have to get a heads up before such decisions could be made. That said, such properties often get snapped up by local governments in the long run via their eminent domain authority.
It comes with a noticeable price tag of some $378,000 in administrative costs, most of which will hit circa 2029. The bill’s fiscal note presumes the state Department of Commerce will spend some 170 hours per year helping local governments in Sound Transit’s stomping grounds navigate the new rules, going up to 540 hours in 2027.
The bill and its companion are co-sponsored by many of the House’s movers and shakers plus Senate Transportation Committee Chair Marko Liias, D-Everett. Clearly, the proposal has legs.
TG
Protections for Domestic Workers
The domestic worker’s bill seems to have finally made it through definition hell. No, you won’t need to get a contract for your kid’s babysitting gig.
HB 2355 is intended to provide “domestic workers,” like nannies, housecleaners, and gardeners, with some protections. Those protections include a minimum wage, a written contract between the employer and employee, and prohibitions on taking workers’ personal belongings.
The bill made it out of Appropriations and into Rules, where it’s waiting for the next action. The most recent modification made sure the bill won’t apply to babysitters who don’t babysit as their main source of income. It died last year while policymakers tried to figure out those kinds of definitions.
RHM
And what didn’t survive…
Regulating college protests
Wildcat campout protests on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza inspired a bill from Rep. Mari Leavitt, D-University Place, which would’ve given universities a path to regulate encampments.
Past tense, because the bill died in committee after a series of questions from Democrats about whether the bill would impede protests, skepticism from Republicans about whether it was needed, and testimony from a woman who said she was harassed at Evergreen State College.
Universities already have time/manner/speech regulations that can limit protests, but those often fall into the political quagmire of heated debate. An encampment on the University of Washington’s central Quad grew to more than 100 tents before an agreement was brokered to close it after 18 days.
Leavitt’s bill would’ve required authorized student groups to give 5-day notice for encampments.
JM
A tax on short-term rentals
That tax on short-term rentals we’ve reported on also died this week in the House. The proposal from Rep. Lisa Parshley, D-Olympia, was among the many bills to die in the chamber’s Appropriations Committee without a companion bill across the rotunda to save it.
Between the monied opposition out to kill it and its debatable effects on the touristy parts of the state, votes were in short supply to push the proposal any further. Time will tell if this idea rises from the grave once more.
TG
Hearings for Supreme Court appointees
A Governor’s power to appoint replacements to the state Supreme Court upon mid-cycle retirements has in effect become the power to stack the court with like-minded justices, because once appointed, the justices almost never lose at the ballot. With Washington’s four-decade streak of Democratic Governors, that power has helped tilt the court further left.
A proposed constitutional amendment by Sen. Chris Gildon, R-Puyallup, would borrow from the U.S. Constitution the Senate’s right to advise and consent the appointment of justices via confirmation hearings. It would give lawmakers a chance to query appointees before they, in effect, become justices for life.
That would be relevant at the moment, as Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed Justice Colleen Melody this winter to replace Mary Yu, and is taking applications to replace Justice Barbara Madsen this spring. That means there will be five seats on the ballot this year, including an open race to replace the retiring Justice Charles Johnson.
Gildon’s gambit, a long-shot good-government notion, died in the cradle, without a hearing.
JM
A leg-up for public grocers
Food deserts have become a progressive cause as Big Grocery consolidation and the rough economics of a low-margin business have left shelves barren in some neighborhoods, especially in Seattle’s Lake City, home of Democrat Rep. Darya Farivar.
Her bill would have allowed cities to open publicly-owned grocery stores with a combination of tools, including buying or leasing land, tax incentives, and even using eminent domain to take properties.
It died without a vote in the House Local Government committee.
JM
Sports and politics
When a lawmaker talks about “the dark side” on the floor of the Washington Senate, chances are there are nefarious politics in play. When it was invoked Tuesday, there were plenty of politics in play — more cringy than nefarious — as the Senate literally gave a robust “GO-SEAHAWKS” cheer to recognize the Super Bowl winners.
Politicians love the easy social lubricant of sports, especially when teams are winners. Rep. Nikki Torres reached for Seahawk receiver Cooper Kupp, who is from her home district in Yakima, and Sens. Liz Lovelett, D-Anacortes, and Deb Krishnadasan, D-Gig Harbor, both took credit for local high schools that had the original Seahawk mascot. Sen. Claudia Kauffman came out with the ball, noting the Seahawks logo came from an indigenous mask, circa 1800s.
Senators broke the dress code to sport jerseys: Bob Hasegawa in Doug Baldwin’s 89, Perry Dozier in Russell Wilson’s 3, T’wina Nobles in a 12 and Matt Boehnke in vintage Matt Hasselbeck. They also broke routine to let an entire, fawning three-page resolution be read.
Sen. Jesse Salomon, D-Shoreline, engaged in quality smack talk, citing wins over the “forty-whiners” and “de-flatriots.”3 His four best days: getting married, having kids being born, buying a boat and watching a Super Bowl win — not necessarily in that order, he said.
Left unsaid was the Democrats’ looming millionaire’s tax, which gives special attention to calculating the earnings of professional athletes. Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle and an architect of the plan, didn’t get his picture taken with Seahawks broadcast legend Steve Raible, who got a special dispensation from Lt. Gov. Denny Heck to give a “Seahawks touchdown!” call from the rostrum.
After a group photo, the Senate recommenced with the usual order of business, voting on elections and child welfare bills. It’s only five months until the Seahawks’ pre-season training camp starts… in Hasegawa’s district, as he noted.
JM
Irksome errata
We misspelled Rep. My-Linh Thai’s name in a story this week about drug pricing. The honorable representative from Bellevue deserves better.
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Camo dog
The Woman Who Lets Paul Live With Her is a fancy kind of tax accountant who specialized in this kind of thing. Apparently avoiding the Washington estate tax is easy because the state has no gift tax, which means you can give it away as the Grim Reaper approaches. It’s also a powerful incentive to leave Washington as death nears.
From $1 to $5
A reference to a scandal, involving illegally deflated footballs, hovering over the New England Patriots when they beat the Seahawks in the 2015 Super Bowl. That defeat, a painful memory for every Hawks fan, will fade a bit when the new banner hangs in the rafters.