Washington’s 2022 legislative session ended Thursday after lawmakers spent several sleepless nights out on the floor.
Senate Minority Leader John Braun, R-Centralia, and House Minority Leader J.T. Wilcox, R-Yelm, met with The Chronicle Friday afternoon to summarize the session, which Wilcox described as a two-round fight for Republicans: Sometimes, bills would be roughed up by House Republicans and get “killed off” in the Senate, sometimes the other way around, he said.
But overall, Braun and Wilcox both said the session was a “failure” by the Legislature to assist the people of Washington. For this they blamed the Democrats, saying the party fell short despite the biggest surplus in the history of the state — $15 billion — and its large majority in both the Senate and House.
Despite the historic, massive surplus, Braun said, Democrats in the Legislature seemed to lack a list of meaningful places to spend it.
“This is a session of missed historic opportunities and misplaced priorities,” Braun said, adding later: “Instead of having a plan, having priorities, (Democrats) let it drift by and spent (the surplus) fecklessly. Not all of them bad, but not in any concerted way.”
Tax Relief
In a time of historic inflation, Braun said he felt perhaps the biggest failure by Democrats this session was to utilize the historic surplus for meaningful tax relief for the average Washingtonian.
“We proposed kind of an omnibus tax reduction that … eliminated the state property tax on the first $250,000 of your home. So we thought that was both helpful, given the pressure on property tax in recent years, and progressive. If you own a $250,000 home you don’t pay any state property tax. If you own a $500,000 home, then you pay half. So the better position you are to pay taxes, the more you’re going to pay,” Braun said.
But this proposal did not pass. Other ideas floated by Republicans included removal of the long-term care tax, which was instead postponed 18 months, and an elimination of a certain state tax on manufacturers.
According to Wilcox, the most significant tax relief proposal in the House was a reduction of sales tax by half a percent.
“That’s a lot of money. It'd be very helpful and it would also be progressive since we’re hearing from the other side all the time that a sales tax is the most regressive tax there is,” Wilcox said.
However, ideological divides between the parties seemed to stand in the way of meaningful change, the minority leaders said.
“We’re open to their ideas,” Braun said of the Democrats. “We had one of their members on the Senate side propose a reduction in the sales tax and every single member of my caucus signed onto that bill. I think that might have killed it, frankly.”
Transportation
Braun said Democrats failed to pass a sustainable transportation package that would fund modern transportation for the upcoming decade.
Broadly, projects helped by the $17 billion package, titled “Move Ahead Washington,” are not all bad, Braun said. Those on Interstate 405, state Route 18 and a bridge over the Columbia River have statewide implications, making them important for the welfare of 20th District residents even though they won’t take place in the area, he said.
However, Braun said he felt the package failed to address “the smaller projects in districts around Washington. Think about the recent work we had here on Chamber Way in Chehalis, that’s a $20 million project. There’s hundreds of them (like that) around Washington, failed intersections, we still have a few more here in Lewis County that need to be worked on. Think about Exit 72. These are the types of projects that needed to be included, they’re not expensive. They needed to be built into it and they didn’t get built in.”
Historically, the transportation package has been crafted with a bipartisan team, according to Braun, but this year Senate Republicans read the details of the package in an email, “a few minutes after they started the press conference,” he said.
Because of this lack of communication, Braun said, Republicans were not able to include more rural projects in the package.
“This is one of the missed historic opportunities and misplaced — or one might say non-existent — priorities for the majority,” Braun said.
Police Reform Bills
Perhaps the biggest rallying cry for Republicans before the start of the session was changing several police reform bills that passed in 2021 following protests after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
As in other areas, the two minority leaders said Democrats were unable to follow through with what they believed to be critical corrections to the reform bills.
“(Democrats) failed in public safety. Where they passed disastrous air quote reforms a year ago, recognized that they were failures and promised that they’d fix them. And on the last day of the session they left the most important bill — that dealt with the ability of police to pursue people in cars that had committed violent crimes — and couldn’t bring it out even after the Senate had already voted on it and it had been watered down in the house,” Wilcox said.
On Senate Bill 1519, Braun said, which was the Senate Repiblicans’ reform to the police reform bills, enough Democrats signed off to give it a philosophical majority and send it to the House, where it was changed somewhat and then passed. The bill went back to the Senate where it was killed on Thursday despite being brought up three different times that night.
“If you go talk to law enforcement right now, people know this. People who want to commit crimes know this. They know if they do something and a law enforcement shows up, if they drive away law enforcement, will do nothing. It's amazing that we think that’s somehow going to work out,” Braun said, adding later: “The law enforcement community needs this bill. They won't bring it for a bill. We tried everything. … They would essentially say ‘no, thank you.’ They didn’t argue, they didn’t provide a counter argument at all. They just said ‘we won’t do that.’”
