The Washington Legislature ended its 105-day session on April 23 with long-fought achievements, some misses and some incomplete work. Gov. Jay Inslee says he wants lawmakers to come back in special session to try again to reach an agreement on the state’s expiring drug possessions law.
Here are The Seattle Times editorial board ratings on only a few of the issues The Times has followed closely. We start with education, which our constitution says is the state’s paramount duty.
EDUCATION: Mixed results; unfinished work: Grade Incomplete
Like students whose fire for straight As fades as graduation nears, lawmakers who vowed to resolve inequities in special education are congratulating themselves for a final paper that’s not quite done.
Their grade for this session: Incomplete.
The infamous McCleary school funding decision of 2012 — which the Legislature had to be forced to abide in 2017 — punted on the question of how to pay for special education. Annually, those services cost at least $400 million more than the state gives to school districts.
Lawmakers found the will to channel $825 million toward special-needs kids over the next four years by increasing reimbursement formulas and raising the cap on the number who can be covered, from 13% to 15% of a district’s population. That pencils out to 1,800 more students, which is welcome progress.
But in 207 districts, over 15% of the student body qualify for special services. The question now is whether legislators revisit this problem before another lawsuit, a.k.a McCleary 2.0, forces the issue.
Washington’s persistent and damning inequities in other areas of education also received attention. Though the Senate did not deign to hold a hearing on whether charter schools should get access to levy dollars, the final budget attempts to right the scales by including more money for charters over the next year — about $6 million, according to early estimates. Most students of these public schools are low-income kids of color.
One of Washington’s most worrisome education trends is the recent drop in college enrollment because it forecasts who gets well-paying jobs and who does not. Legislators tackled this problem by making College in the High School courses free to all students. That saves families money up front — those classes previously cost $65 per credit — while making it more likely that students will actually seek higher education. A win for everyone.
Many education experts feared that the McCleary-motivated overhaul of education funding would fuel discrepancies between wealthier and less affluent districts. Those warnings are proving accurate. Avoiding confrontation with this truth is negligence.
HOUSING | Works well with others: Grade B
Few issues in Olympia had lawmakers singing from the same song sheet as housing.
Developers, real estate agents, environmentalists, advocates for those with low incomes — all got behind Gov. Jay Inslee and legislative leaders as they promised to elevate housing as a top priority this year.
In the end, lawmakers invested more than $1 billion in housing, including $400 million in the Housing Trust Fund that will build approximately 3,000 new permanently affordable homes.
They also approved legislation to assist people affected by racist housing covenants that kept nonwhite people out of certain neighborhoods for generations. That bill offers help with down payments and closing costs.
Legislators passed a landmark bill to allow multifamily housing in nearly every part of the state, intending to boost the number of duplexes and fourplexes in neighborhoods now reserved for single-family homes.
Earlier drafts prohibited cities like Seattle from enacting their own affordability requirements. Thankfully, that was changed to allow cities to create, modify and expand affordable housing stipulations.
The practical impact of the “middle housing” bill is unknown. Whatever development will come will surely be uneven. A 2019 rezone in Seattle produced more dense housing in popular and more affluent neighborhoods while almost none in lower-income areas.
A potential hint: After taking effect in January 2022, the California HOME Act made it possible for homeowners to split their home’s lot and build up to four homes on a single-family parcel. So far, a University of California, Berkeley, study found that some of California’s largest cities had received just a handful of applications for either lot splits or new units, while other cities reported none.
Meanwhile, a fundamental responsibility of local government — land use — has been subsumed by Olympia.
BLAKE FIX ON DRUG POSSESSION | Fails to live up to potential: Incomplete
For two years, the Legislature knew that it had to tackle drug possession laws.
In 2021, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down Washington’s criminal statute prohibiting possession of a controlled substance, which was considered a felony.
After the State v. Blake ruling, lawmakers approved a temporary measure making drug possession a misdemeanor on the third occurrence, with police giving treatment options after the first two arrests. Police and others criticized the system as unworkable, as they were unable to track who had received treatment and who had not.
This session, the Senate passed a bipartisan fix, but the House version failed to win enough votes before the Legislature adjourned last week. Without further legislative action, drug possession will be legalized statewide in July. Many cities and counties would likely enact their own drug laws.
House Democratic leadership and Gov. Jay Inslee were quick to blame Republicans, who voted to oppose the measure. Don’t believe it. The House, Senate and Governor’s Office are controlled by Democrats. Republicans raised legitimate concerns about the bill’s details.
A few take-aways from this debacle: House Democrats must grapple with members of their caucus who would be fine with decriminalizing possession of controlled substances, and therefore have no interest in negotiation. Inslee was a non-factor, perhaps taking for granted that a deal was at hand. But his lack of situational awareness and political juice was striking. A compromise is possible, and House Democratic leaders should scramble to get the votes to pass the Senate version, and then ask Inslee to call a special session and finish the job.
When the editorial board asked incumbents and candidates about a Blake fix last year, most said it was a no-brainer and there wasn’t much to iron out.
The train wreck at the end of the session represented a serious failure in counting votes and legislative strategy. The Legislature needs to get this right.
GUN SAFETY | Persistent hard work pays off: Grade A
It was years in the making, with starts and stops along the way, but the state Legislature put in the hard work to pass meaningful gun reform legislation this year. For this, the Legislature and Gov. Jay Inslee deserve an A.
The package of bills includes a ban on the sale of military-style semi-automatic weapons, a new law that gives the state the right to sue the firearms industry for failures to act responsibly and a measure creating a 10-day waiting period for firearm purchases. In the course of negotiations toward the session’s end, while mass shootings were reported across the nation, the Legislature agreed to amendments that would exempt people on active military duty ordered to move to Washington, or military retirees moving here, and one that gives gun dealers a three-month grace period in which to liquidate their inventory.
There have been efforts over the years to help make Washingtonians safer. Inslee signed bills in 2022 that ban the import and sale of large-capacity magazines, limit weapons at government meetings and election spaces and further tighten prohibitions on the assembly of untraceable “ghost” guns. And in 2021, lawmakers passed into law a bill that bans open-carry of weapons at the Capitol in Olympia and at permitted demonstrations around the state.
As expected, a legal challenge has already been lodged against the state over the new semi-automatic weapons ban. Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he’s optimistic his office will prevail.
OPEN GOVERNMENT | Consistently fails to meet expectations: Grade F
Where do we start? Leaders in Washington’s Legislature continue to demonstrate yearslong disdain for the public’s right to know in ways that are both clueless and diabolical.
They long maintained lawmakers were not subject to the state’s open government laws. Even after a public outcry five years ago and the state Supreme Court ruling that in fact they were, leaders keep devising new ways to thwart the people’s right to know.
For starters, with the imprimatur of the House Democratic caucus leadership, lawmakers increasingly began invoking “legislative privilege” as a blanket order to hide sometimes embarrassing emails and other documents from the public.
Defenders try to build a rickety bridge to a constitutional provision that protects their debate statements from legal repercussions. Opponents say no such privilege exists. We will all find out. The Washington Coalition of Open Government filed a lawsuit last week to challenge this in court.
Once again, legislators ignored the recommendations of the state’s Sunshine Committee, charged with reviewing the state’s public records exemptions. One of the Legislature’s appointees to the committee actually told a constituent he thought the state didn’t need the committee. Too bad. The Legislature needs its help.
This session the body created at least five new exemptions to add to the more than 600 already in law. They can’t help themselves.
On open government, over years, the Legislature consistently fails to meet expectations.