2025 legislative review
Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia, chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee.
Despite our opposition to the EPR programs introduced this year, AWB will continue to evaluate each EPR program individually and has supported them where they make sense to manage specific products and have clear goals and outcomes. Previous programs AWB has supported include mercury lights and the paint stewardship program. The push for EPR programs is not likely to abate and Washington will likely follow the steps of other states that introduce similar programs.
In other environmental areas we saw some attempts to push back on the Trump administration’ s actions on the federal level. Legislators expressed concern that with a retreat of federal oversight there would no protections for the environment. One response was SB 5350, the Environmental Crimes bill. This bill, discussed below, would elevate environmental violations in severity. Some crimes would be higher misdemeanors while others would be elevated to felonies. It also allowed for the prosecution of individual workers involved in the incident. AWB and our members had considerable concerns with this bill over the ambiguity it created in terms of enforcement. Given the recent actions by the administration, it’ s likely there will be additional policies like this proposed.
energy
There were a number of bills put forward to help address energy costs and to address some of the bottlenecks we’ re seeing in terms of the energy space. These included bills on energy transmission and some early stabs on some permitting and other developer-friendly policies. Unfortunately, not a lot of these proposals went through, given the financial situation which hung over the Legislature. Still, there were a number of positive bills that were advanced by Democrats on a bipartisan basis that did help address some of the concerns our members have with some of the policies that have been enacted over the past seven years.
HB 1543 increasing compliance pathways for the clean buildings performance standard
Passed / AWB Supported sponsor: Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia
The Department of Commerce requested this bill and worked with AWB to help make it easier for business owners to apply for exemptions and comply with the state’ s Clean Buildings program. The original bill, passed in 2019, requires large commercial and residential buildings in excess of 20,000 square feet to do an energy audit and then invest in energy efficiency upgrades to improve upon that baseline. Building owners soon found that the audit is expensive and the upgrades are extremely expensive. Rural school districts who can’ t afford the large levy lifts to improve their schools were particularly hard-hit. This drove some conversations around the cost of
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