Dear friends and neighbors,

I’m glad to let you know that one of the most important bills of the session has been introduced – the Millionaires Tax proposal, to raise funding for schools, health care, and services by taxing the few households in our state making more than $1 million in income each year.

Under the bill, SB 6346, yearly household income over $1 million a year will be taxed at 9.9%. Nothing under $1 million a year will be taxed. That means only about 20,000-30,000 households will pay this tax. It will raise about $3.7 billion a year, which we’ll be able to invest in fully funding education and providing health care and essential services that are more important than ever with the cuts coming from the federal government under Trump’s H.R. 1.

The bill also includes tax cuts – an expansion of our Working Families Tax Credit, a doubling of our small business tax credit to help more small businesses, and removing the sales tax from everyday essentials at the store like hygiene and grooming products, just like we don’t tax food.

It’s also important to note what this tax doesn’t do – this is not a broad-based tax on everyone. This is a narrow, targeted tax on the people who can afford to pay and are already getting huge benefits from our upside-down and unfair tax system. We know that Washingtonians making less than $33,500 a year pay 13.8% of their income in state and local taxes while those making over $878,000 pay only 4.1%. This bill would just ask those wealthy few, who are making so much wealth in an economy with growing inequality, to pay what they owe.

I am proud to be a co-sponsor of this bill and look forward to working with my colleagues to perfect this bill and pass it into law.

Progress on housing

This week, we also passed one of the most important deadlines of session, when bills have to pass out of a policy committee in their chamber of origin. As the chair of the Senate Housing Committee, I’m glad I was able to advance a couple important bills to move us forward on housing affordability and homelessness prevention.

  • My bill, SB 6015, creates state-approved “permit-ready” residential building plans to help reduce permitting delays and speed up housing production.
  • SB 6237 strengthens rental disclosure requirements around flooding history and flood risk, so renters have clearer information before signing a lease. After the floods in December 2025, we learned that renters don’t receive the same notice about moving into a flood area that homeowners do — this bill will fix that. I introduced this one too.
  • SB 6026 allows residential development in more commercial and mixed-use zones.
  • SB 6069 makes it easier to site permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, and indoor emergency housing and shelters.

Floor action update

Last week, I discussed my bill on “AI nurses,” SB 5904, which would make it an unlawful practice for any non-human entity, like a large language model chatbot, to be identified to a patient as a nurse. That bill passed the Senate unanimously, and I’m thankful to my colleagues for their support.

Next week, we’ll be halfway through the short 60-day session and working hard on passing bills off of the Senate floor. Please share any thoughts, feedback, and questions with me at Jessica.Bateman@leg.wa.gov – it’s always great to hear from you. Thank you for reading!

In service,

-Jess