Published date: May 2, 2025

APWA Sine Die 2025

The Legislature finished their legislative session at 6 pm, Sunday, April 27^th.   Passing the operating budget, transportation budget and capital budget, they finished not really knowing if the Governor would sign all the revenue bills upon which the budgets are built. Governor Ferguson has up to 20 days after the end of the session to make these decisions.

The Governor has line-item veto authority on budget bills, but only section veto authority on policy bills, which includes the various revenue bills.  The operating budget is primarily relies on three major revenue bills:

HB 2081: Business and Occupation tax (about $5.623 billion over the next 6 years);

SB 5813: Tax rates, capital gains, estate tax ($635 million over the next 6 years); and

SB 5814: Excise taxes ($2.68 billion over 6 years).

There are several other revenue bills, see here, but those 3 are the primary sources of the roughly $9 billion in new revenue over the next four years (the Legislature budgets over two biennium). The budget, SB 5167, contains over $5 billion in cuts to help cover the four-year $16 billion budget hole.

The transportation budget is supported by revenues created by these two bills:

SB 5801: the transportation resources bill.  This bill raises the gas tax by 6 cents and has a inflator on that increase of 2% yearly.   It also has weight fee increases, rental care and Peer-to-peer car sharing tax increases, and a luxury vehicle tax, among other revenue increases.   See here for a good summary of the bill, which raises about $3.2 billion over 6 years.

SB 5802: Rebalancing statutory fund transfers and revenue dedications for transportation.  This bill changes the general fund transfers that helped fund the Move Ahead Washington transportation funding package, transfers funds from the multimodal account and the public works account to the general fund, which supports the operating budget, and authorizes a 1/10^th of 1 percent transfer of the state’s 6.5% sales and use tax to the multimodal account, starting in the next biennium (2027-29).  This will transfer about $600 million biennially.  Here is a good summary of the transfers.

The transportation budget, SB 5161, and its associated revenue bills, addresses the decreasing fuel tax collections,  and the project inflation pressures that made it impossible to complete many of the projects associated with the Connecting Washington and the Move Ahead Washington transportation packages.  This budget should allow those projects to go forward and provides about $1 billion for fish passage barrier removal and helps fund the State Ferry improvement plan. Here is a summary of the budget expenditures.

As noted above, whether the Governor will sign all or a portion of the revenue bills is still unknown.  If he veto’s any of those revenue bills then the budgets will not pencil out, and, I suspect, we will see a special session.

Budgets

Contracts and Purchasing

Permitting

Transportation

Water

Uncategorized Bills