AWC began the 2018 session with our sights set on addressing housing shortages and affordability, helping individuals with mental health and drug addiction issues, and providing tools to enhance local economic vitality. With only a few days left before the session ends and before final budget and policy decisions are hammered out, it appears most of these issues have been addressed – at least in part.

Housing shortage and affordability challenges are evident in many parts of the state and legislators know it. We’ve seen them pay more attention to funding low-income housing and homelessness programs, as well as providing tools to address abandoned foreclosed homes. We will need to have more conversations in advance of the 2019 session on the best ways to tackle low inventories of affordable workforce housing.

We’re witnessing significant investments in human service support programs, some of which are continuation of existing ones and others more focused on innovative community-based efforts. We won’t know for sure until session ends what level of policy and funding support will be adopted, but we’re heartened by the bipartisan recognition of need.

Capturing legislators’ attention on economic development issues is difficult during a short session and at a time of overall economic prosperity in Washington. How to help maintain and expand it across the state continues to be of interest, but not necessarily a focus. We were heartened by adoption earlier this session of the capital budget which funds critical infrastructure projects like the Public Works Trust Fund and agreement on steps to address water resource issues in rural and urbanizing areas.

It appears cities will be spared cuts to state-shared revenues and they’re likely to be increased in communities that don’t ban legal marijuana businesses. We’re also hoping for funding of additional classes to train law enforcement personnel. We’ve spent a considerable amount of time working to fend off new costly mandates, or for those legislators choose to impose, finding ways to lessen the impacts. Along with our county partners in particular, we’ve worked to call out that whether good policy or not, unfunded mandates result in the need to cut or eliminate other critical local programs that legislators expect local governments to fund. We expect this issue to intensify during the 2019 session.

We’ve updated a short list of policy bills for both the House and Senate that we’re distributing to all legislators and leadership, as well as our chart of preferred budget approaches to let them know how they can best help cities. Stay tuned to AWC newsletters and emails for any final information and what (if anything) you can do from home to help finalize a positive session for cities.