2023 Legislative Session - Our Successes

2023 Legislative Success

The 2023 Legislative Session was a historically successful session for Sierra Club Washington State. We passed important legislation that diverts our state’s urban land use away from wasteful sprawl in favor of sustainable density, as well as includes more community opportunity to participate in protecting critical habitat and increasing our public forest base. We also secured tens of millions of dollars across multiple state budgets to preserve our treasured public lands and work towards restoring our iconic salmon populations.

We couldn’t have done all this (and more!) without the steadfast and devoted support of our staff, volunteers, and most importantly, our grassroots community. Through thousands of sign-ins, messages to legislators, meetings, and more over the last four months, your advocacy made a truly significant impact. With your support, we have taken significant steps this legislative session in advancing environmental justice across the Evergreen State. Read on below to learn more about our accomplishments!

Building Abundant, Affordable Housing

Following last year’s shortfall, this year housing policy started off legislative session with a lot of hope, interest, and some healthy skepticism. Our coalition Homes 4 WA, led by our partners at Futurewise, leveraged this momentum to push a climate-conscious approach to the housing crisis.

With our coalition stronger and having more support among legislators, our strategy included moving a trio of urban land use / infill policies, which together would boldly divert Washington’s urban land use away from wasteful sprawl in favor of sustainable density. This included the following bills:

  • “Missing Middle” Housing (MMH)  - increasing the ability to build duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes;
  • Transit Oriented Development (TOD) - building more housing around transit lines and centers; and
  • Climate Planning in the Growth Management Act (GMA) -  reducing carbon emissions, reducing vehicle miles traveled, fostering resiliency & preparing for climate impacts and natural hazards, and advancing environmental justice through comprehensive plans, development regulations, and regional plans.

Having been previously introduced, the MMH and GMA bills had more attention throughout the session with legislators more eager to collaborate in a bi-partisan manner in order to address concerns and strengthen these bills. TOD - a newly introduced and somewhat controversial bill - benefitted from less attention early on in session, but suffered later on when cities began to push against it.

Ultimately both MMH and GMA bills passed by weathering internal and external opposition while TOD stalled in the final hour due to a lack of education from the coalition and limited engagement from legislators. While these bills took on many amendments that dulled their impacts, the final bills are a huge step towards redesigning and reinvesting in our communities. 

Overall, a very successful year for transportation and housing policy! Our team and coalition partners are looking forward to building on that success next year!

Protecting Instream Flows for Salmon

Endangered salmon face many threats but none more serious than growing impacts to
“instream flows” in rivers and streams across the state. Stream flows, the water levels in rivers and streams that are essential for fish to survive and spawn, are increasingly impacted by droughts, illegal water use, and climate change generally.

The State Supreme Court over the past 20 years has consistently ruled that new applicants for water right permits must fully mitigate for any harm to salmon caused by removal of water under their proposed projects. In areas where water is scarce, this is often accomplished by having permit applicants purchase water rights from existing permit holders resulting in "no net loss" of water in the stream.

Developers, water utilities, and others have complained for years about these restrictions and this year introduced legislation (SB 5517) designed to overturn those decisions, allowing new development that would lower Department of Ecology set “minimum instream flows” designed to protect fish on state rivers and streams.

SB 5517 would have allowed new water right applicants to avoid requirements to fully mitigate for impacts to stream flows. Instead, developers could mitigate by simply planting vegetation rather than replacing water or by conducting mitigation miles away from the area impacted by the proposed project. This approach would lead to depletion of instream flows and significant loss of salmon across the State.

Our response was to work with Tribes and other coalition partners to strongly oppose this legislation. In addition, we mobilized our grassroots members and organized over a hundred people to register their opposition to the bill at the Senate hearing. Our strong grassroots opposition helped us defeat the bill before it was brought up for a vote in committee.

Preserving Mature Forests: Full Funding for Trust Land Transfers

Protecting public lands is key to functioning ecosystems and mitigating climate change. Washington’s carbon-dense mature and old growth forests in particular serve as a premier solution to combating the causes and impacts of the climate crisis.

This legislative session our main public lands priority was supporting the revitalization of the Trust Land Transfer (TLT) program, which - through local groups and volunteer leaders - identifies and nominates state lands for transfer of management to different agencies. In coalition with our partners, we secured $19.5 million to fund six conservation projects across the state-- Eglon, Devils Lake, Upper Dry Gulch, Chapman Lake, West Tiger, and Dabob Bay. Additionally, the legislature also passed an important policy bill that finally formalizes the TLT process, making it a more transparent and accessible program. Communities will now be able to participate in the TLT program to protect critical habitat and increase our public forest base. Given that this program went unfunded for the past several years, this is a major win for our public lands! 

Towards the end of session, $83 million was successfully placed in the budget to protect 2,000 acres of carbon-dense, legacy forests; purchase younger replacement forests to provide revenue for rural communities; and convening a stakeholder process to discuss approaches between legacy and working forests as the need for carbon sequestration increases.

These wins are an important step to centering and preserving legacy forests. In future legislative sessions, we will continue to advocate for more acres of our most carbon-dense forests to be protected while we celebrate our victories.

Restoring Endangered Salmon and Orca: Funding for Studies of the Lower Snake River

Decades of scientific analysis and studies conclude the lower Snake River must be restored to stop salmon extinction, and save endangered Southern Resident Orcas whose primary food source is Chinook Salmon.

The Washington State Legislature confirmed those findings, and is dedicated to honoring Tribal treaty rights and restoring the lower snake river. Our coalition was able to secure $7.5 million across the Transportation and Operating Budgets to plan for the replacement of services currently provided by the four aging dams on the lower Snake River.

This funding includes $5 million to study alternatives for barges currently in use, $2 million to develop a detailed plan to transition the dam’s energy services to a more reliable and efficient system, and $500,000 for analysis to plan for irrigation availability to maintain important agricultural production and jobs.

These concrete steps are necessary in supporting a potential final decision of breaching by the federal government, who owns and operates the four lower Snake River dams.

Our region has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on mitigation efforts, yet we’ve failed to recover even one of the 13 populations of salmon on the brink of extinction today. We have an urgent and historic opportunity right now to overcome decades of conflict, litigation, and the failed status quo– and instead work together, honor our treaty responsibilities to Tribal Nations, invest in communities and infrastructure, develop new clean energy sources, and ensure salmon abundance for future generations.

Read more at the Save Our Wild Salmon Press Release.