Action This Week on Rates-and-Charges Legislation
In our Week 9 Legislative Update, Ryan Baye (WACD Director of Legislative and Membership Services) reported:
Last week House Bill 1488 passed the House. Now it is scheduled for a vote in the Senate’s Ways & Means Committee on Thursday, March 13. It appears that the bill will bypass the public hearing component of the committee process, which is a good sign of support at the committee level.
The current status of HB 1488 is shown on the Legislature’s website in this graphic:
Background
WACD’s work on rates-and-charges legislation is authorized by Resolution 2022-09 and Resolution 2023-28. R 2023-28 says:
WACD to work with conservation districts, Washington State Conservation Commission, others, and the legislature in 2024 to change Chapter 89.08 RCW, to allow local jurisdictions to set their own rate as appropriate for their local areas.
Heather Wendt (WACD Director of Development and Engagement) reports:
Providing Local Control of Rates and Charges per Resolution 2023-28 was noted in the matrix of possible funding mechanisms by WACD’s Sustainable Funding Committee at the Spring Legislative Workshop in May 2024. After that meeting, a group of CD managers, including the resolution sponsor, agreed to work on drafting the necessary revisions to the RCW. An ad hoc Rates and Charges group was formed and started meeting in July 2024. The group created a position paper to document the proposed changes to the RCW and to keep CDs informed of the proposed changes. The group has met to date a total of 18 times. Once the position paper and changes to the RCW were created, we brought in Brynn Brady, WACD’s contract lobbyist, to craft a strategy for introducing the bill in the House and Senate. This meant finding bill sponsors and a great deal of education and outreach to legislators by both Brynn and group members.
Bill action
House Bill 1488 was introduced on January 21, 2025, and immediately had an accelerated position compared to most bills. By going directly to a financial committee (in this case, the House Committee on Finance), the bill jumped the usual first step of going to a policy committee.
On February 11, the Committee passed a substitute version of the bill, and on March 3, the substitute bill was adopted by the House. We had hoped to see more support from the minority party but the vote ended up being along party lines. Many legislators in the minority party did express support for the bill, and based on this, we believe support for conservation district funding is likely better than what the actual vote might indicate.
What happens next?
Now that SHB 1488 has passed the House, the legislation moves to the Senate. It is scheduled for action by the Senate Committee on Ways & Means on Thursday, March 13, at 4:00 pm. While the House version of the bills seems to be the one moving forward (not SB 5510), anything can happen between now and the Governor signing the legislation. This is not the time to assume everything will go forward as planned. We still need conservation districts to weigh in with their legislators in support of this rates-and-charges legislation.
You can look up your legislators and find the committees they are on at: https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/. Find contact information for legislators and their legislative aids at: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rosters/members