| Dear neighbors,
This week, House Democrats rolled out three major budget packages and a state revenue plan for the next two years. The proposals reflect our values and commitment to an inclusive future and economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. We will invest in the people of Washington by funding K-12 education, affordable housing, higher education, behavioral health services, and additional projects critical to communities across our state. Read below for more information, tune in to TVW to watch Monday’s press conference which covers all three budgets, or watch this video on the House Democrats’ Facebook page. The budget itself, and supporting documents can be found here. |
Making investments in our state and communities
We are working to contain costs, but as our population continues to grow, so does the traffic on our roads, the number of students in our classrooms, and our overall cost of living. The budget fulfills the Legislature’s obligation to fully fund K-12 public education, which has absorbed most of the newly generated state revenue over the past few years. About 53 percent of the state budget – tens of billions of dollars goes to education. In addition to our continued investment in public education, we are funding critical areas of the state budget, including behavioral health, affordable housing, environmental priorities, and a new Workforce Education Investment. You can read an overview of the entire budget proposal, but we wanted to highlight the following items that many of you have reached out about this session.
In order to fund these needed investments, House Democrats are capturing the influx of enormous wealth in our state through a proposed Extraordinary Profits Tax from the sale of stocks and bonds where profits are over $100,000 for a single filer and $200,000 for joint filers. This tax would only affect the extraordinarily rich people in our state – only 13,400 households, or about 0.4 percent of the taxpayers in the state would be responsible. Also proposed is a change to the Real Estate Excise Tax (REET) structure, which would cut taxes for 82 percent of Washingtonians selling their homes. Rates would only increase for those selling property valued over $1.5 million. Building schools, affordable housing and keeping our growing population moving
Washington’s economy is booming and with it has come an explosion in our population, but this growth is straining our transportation system, housing affordability and classrooms. In the House Democratic capital budget and transportation proposals released on Monday, there are large investments in every corner of our state. Highlights include $1.1 billion to build public schools, $155 million for affordable housing, $463 million to help salmon and orcas and $117 million for community behavioral health facilities. There is also a $10 billion transportation budget investment for new ferries, a new bridge connecting Washington and Oregon and major funding to remove fish-barriers in road culverts as part of the solution to help our struggling orca population. The projects funded in these budgets won’t just help address many of the pressing issues we are facing, like affordable housing and the mental health crisis – these projects will also put people to work all over Washington. You can look at the full details of the budget proposals with the links below, including access to information about projects happening in our area. Capital Budget
Transportation Budget We worked to ensure that projects in the 11th District were funded. A couple of the projects we are most excited about are:
We hope you’ll join us in supporting these proposals that really focus on investing in our future. Sincerely, Rep. Zack Hudgins Rep. Steve Bergquist |
