Members of the Washington state Legislature and Gov. Bob Ferguson convened Monday for the first day of the 2026 legislative session.
Ferguson will deliver his State of the State address Tuesday morning as lawmakers once again face a looming budget deficit. Lawmakers must address an affordability crisis, the state's aging infrastructure and a host of other issues during the short 60-day session ahead.
Members of the media and leaders of the Washington state government met in a Senate hearing room last Friday morning to discuss priorities one final time before the session began.
As might be expected, the budget dominated conversation once again as the state faces a predicted $2.3 billion deficit just one year after passing what critics have called the largest tax increase in state history.
The subject permeated each of the four panel sessions with a slate of Washington lawmakers and the governor.
The pre-session briefing featured three panels with leadership from both parties and houses of the Legislature and finished with a 30-minute media session with Ferguson. When discussing the budget, a proposed “millionaires tax” and use of the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) funds were popular topics. Lawmakers and the governor also discussed three statewide issues that have the greatest potential to impact Southwest Washington counties directly.
Lawmakers on the transportation panel and Ferguson discussed investment in the state's aging bridges and its ferry system. Progress on the issue could be big news for Lewis County, which is one of the largest counties in the state by land area and has a number of aging bridges, with many important spans, such as the Ceres Hill bridge, nearing the end of their useful lives.
Lawmakers also discussed taking a much closer look at tort and liability reform in the state. The amount of money the state has needed to settle lawsuits filed against it has skyrocketed in recent years. Reforms extending the statute of limitations for tort lawsuits against the state have also led to a spike in insurance rates for counties.
Finally, legislators also discussed another issue that has been plaguing Lewis County’s coffers: public defender case load limits.
Infrastructure investment
While the transportation budget often doesn't make headlines, it has become central to the discussion this year and was featured heavily in Ferguson's proposed budget released late last year in December. In the proposal, Ferguson called for an additional $3 billion in funding for the state's aging infrastructure over the next 10 years. To fund the investment, he wants to tap into the recent gas tax hikes passed in 2025 and use bonds to pay for projects.
Transportation committee members from both parties applauded the increased attention for infrastructure maintenance. Democrats in particular pitched the proposal as not only a way to improve the state's infrastructure, but as a way to add jobs in a challenging labor market.
“One of the things we can do to create jobs in the short term is more highway preservation,” said Sen. Marko Liias, D-Snohomish County. “Economists tell us that every billion dollars in highway maintenance and preservation is between 10 and 20 thousand jobs. The economy right now in Washington could use this.”
Republicans, however, were largely opposed to the idea of bonding for the money to pay for infrastructure improvements. They instead want a piece of the pie from the state's Climate Commitment Act (CCA) revenues. Ferguson has proposed using those revenues to supplement funding for the state's Working Families Tax Credit, triggering an onslaught of proposals to tap the funds.
Senate Transportation Budget Committee ranking member state Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, with support from others in his party, said he would not support bonding to build infrastructure that would likely need to be replaced before the bond was paid back. His counterpart on the House Transportation Budget Committee, state Rep. Andrew Barkis, R-Olympia, said he is concerned about the state's debt load and frequency of bonding and instead would like to use CCA funds to do the work
“I think if we’re going to address maintenance and preservation, we need to look at existing revenues,” Barkis said. “You’re going to hear me all session long talk about the use of Climate Commitment Act … We need to start (using) some of those existing resources before we further the responsibility and the debt load for the people of Washington state.”
Democrats on the panel and chairs for both the Senate and House Transportation Budget Committees, Liias, D-Edmonds, and state Rep. Jake Fey, D-Tacoma, left the door open for using bonding for larger cost and longer lifespan projects, such as replacing bridges entirely.
“I agree with Sen. King that we should only bond for things that are going to last longer than the bond period,” Liias said. “If the governor's proposal is to use bonded funds to replace some of the very old bridges that we have seen fail us in the last year, then I think there may be value in taking a look at that.”
Tort and liability costs
Leadership for both parties in both the Senate and the House addressed the rising cost of making settlement payouts for lawsuits against the state. Recently, the amount of money the state has had to pay out in settlements has gone up for a range of reasons. Some point to a bill recently passed by the Legislature that extended the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims as an explanation for the increase in claims.
The state now faces pressure to put more than $500 million in a fund used to pay for the settlements.
Cost increases are also hitting Washington state’s counties. Lewis County faced a last-minute change to its 2026 budget planning this fall just before the deadline to submit the budget. The county was forced to plan for an additional $1.2 million for liability insurance payments to the Washington state counties risk pool. Premiums go up when counties in the risk pool face more lawsuits and as a result more settlement payments.
During the pre-session briefing, state Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, took the lead addressing the dire situation for state tort and liability. The local politician and leader of state Republicans in the Senate said he and his party would support some reforms to tort and liability, but stressed that his higher priority was to fix the institutional problems that have led to so many lawsuits.
He called out in particular the state's troubled roll out of its JR-25 policy that critics have accused of being the primary cause of overcrowding in the state's juvenile rehabilitation facilities, such as Green Hill and Echo Glen. The law allows inmates to remain at what had been a facility for only juveniles until the age of 25 before being turned over to the state Department of Corrections.
“We're not going to solve it by simply changing the tort liability system, although I am certainly in favor of that,” Braun said. “We need to start by changing the way we deal with people that we are required to take care of.”
Democrats during the session, particularly state Senate President Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, also addressed the issue and in a relatively rare moment agreed with his counterpart in the Senate that the states need to address the source of the lawsuits. However, he also said he is aware of policy coming from a Democrat senator that looks to make changes to the claims process.
Pedersen did not specify the exact details but said changes to how claims are filed could improve “access to justice for people who have been harmed” and reduce the likelihood of large financial settlements.
Public defenders
The state has, since the last legislative session, been dealing with challenges in public defense, and in particular with the challenge of finding enough public defenders to keep courts running smoothly.
“Just like you can't send somebody to jail if there's not a police officer on the street to arrest them,” House Minority Leader state Rep. Drew Stokesbary said. “You also can't send somebody to jail if you can never get a trial because they don't have an attorney.”
The problem has led the Washington state Supreme Court to recently rule for incrementally lowering the case load limit for public defenders in the state of Washington. Counties, particularly those in rural areas with less tax revenue, have since decried the decision, pointing out that it poses the potential to greatly increase their costs for providing public defense to defendants who cannot afford their own attorneys.
The issue was identified as one of Lewis County’s highest priorities going into this year's legislative session.
According to Braun, it's an issue members of his party have been looking to address for some time. He added that the case load limit imposed by the state Supreme Court may force more immediate action.
“The caseload issue from the state Supreme Court is going to force us to do that sooner rather than later,” Braun said. “We have a lot of work to do on public safety.”
Millionaires tax
While less specific to the priorities to Southwest Washington, discussion about developing an income tax on millionaires during the pre-session briefing came with a promise from Ferguson that the tax would come with some form of tax relief for small business owners and middle and lower income families. It’s a promise that if kept could have an outsized impact for Lewis County.
“There's going to have to be tax relief for small business owners,” Ferguson said. “That's a direct result of those dollars. I've also laid out other ideas as well, K through 12 education, eliminating the sales tax on common household items, clothes under $100, etc.”
As part of the governor's 2026 supplemental budget proposal, he proposed an income tax on individuals making more than $1 million in the state of Washington. The proposal has been framed by supporters as a way to address the state's “regressive” tax code that taxes lower income residents a higher percentage of their money than those with higher incomes.
Republicans before and during the session pushed back on the proposal, pointing out that the tax would not help the state with its current budget woes and insisting that the policy is a clever way to institute an income tax that will eventually apply to all Washington residents. State Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, added that he does not trust claims that passing any form of income tax would result in less sales or property taxes.
“First, it was ‘tax the billionaires.’ Now, it's ‘tax the millionaires.’ And tomorrow, it will be ‘tax the thousandaires.’ It'll be the rest of us,” Couture said. “Frankly, that's why voters, continuously and over time, deny income taxes in the state, because they simply do not trust the fact that we will eliminate sales or no taxes or anything else.”
