Seattle/King County Climate News 2.7.24
Robin Briggs
It's a busy time. Here's some of what's been happening.
Seattle
House Our Neighbors announced that it would run a campaign for a new initiative for social housing. The previous initiative set up the administration of the social housing, this one will be to fund the housing. The initiative would apply a 5% payroll tax on companies who have employees making more than $1M per year, and could raise $50M per year, starting in 2025. This could be enough to pay for 2000 additional units of new social housing over 10 years. House Our Neighbors will have 180 days to gather 26,521 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
The Seattle Transportation Plan and Levy are expected to be released sometime in Feb., and will have 4 weeks of public review, after which it is expected to go to council in April. The Transportation Levy needs to be passed this summer in order to get on the ballot for Nov. The City has planned to meet its decarbonization goals for 2030 mainly by vehicle electrification and mode shift, and one thing to evaluate for the Transportation Levy is whether the planned investments will be enough to get the level of mode shift that we need.
The draft Comprehensive Plan is now many months delayed, but expected in Feb or March.
State
Legislators are holding Town Halls, see here for a schedule. Usually the legislators give a recap of how things are going, sometimes will discuss for things that failed why they failed. It is a great chance to ask questions about climate bills, even just bringing the topic up shows the legislator that people care about it. It can be a simple matter of asking what has been done on climate, or it can be any specific climate concern you have.
The Legislative Session just passed its fiscal cutoff, and the next deadline is Feb 13 for when bills must have passed their House of Origin, or be Necessary To Implement the Budget. Below see the status of some of the big climate bills, here's a link to see many others. Click the tab on the bottom to show Dead Bills.
These bills have passed their Chamber of Origin, and move on to the opposite chamber:
HB 1589, PSE Decarbonization
SB 6256, Solar Consumer Protection
SB 6278, Promoting Organic Agriculture
SB 5931, Salmon Safe Tires
These bills have been scheduled for a floor vote:
HB 2131, Allow networked geo-thermal heating
HB 1391, Heat Pump Navigator
HB 1433, Home Energy Score
HB 1368, Electric School Buses
All other bills that are still under consideration are in their chamber's Rules Committee. The Rules Committee in each chamber schedules bills for floor votes.
These bills failed to advance and are no longer under consideration:
HB 2070, Curb Act
SB 6052, Oil Pricing Transparency
HB 1283, Require ESG Reporting and Options in State Pension Plan
HJR 4210, Green Amendment
Elsewhere
The Biden Administration announced that they would postpone making a decision on new LNG export terminals until it can more thoroughly study the effect on the climate and on the American public. This is a major win for the climate, as the new terminals would be a natural gas mega-project and have been described as a "climate bomb". For more info on this, there's a new podcast from Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins with more background information.
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