Dear friends and neighbors,
The Legislature has adjourned for the 2025 legislative session! For 105 days, we took on the biggest issues facing our state, including the most challenging budget situation since the Great Recession.
People often say budgets are moral documents. The investments we make in our communities are how we ensure we give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed and thrive. This year has been a tough year on that front, but I’m proud of the work we have done in a challenging situation. At every step, we stayed focused on protecting the people and communities who rely on our state’s investments.
Even under serious constraints, we prioritized education, with more than a billion dollars in new money for K-12. The budget increases funding for special education and helps with the growing daily operating costs of running our schools. We rejected austerity and chose not to accept an irresponsible, all-cuts budget — instead, we raised new revenue, including an update to make our capital gains and estate taxes more progressive, and B&O tax surcharges on some of the world’s largest, most profitable corporations.
It’s a tradition for some legislators to wear shiny outfits on sine die – we call it “shiny die”
While I was excited that we raised revenue to invest in education and protect services, I’m disappointed we weren’t able to do more to fix our upside-down tax code. I remain committed to pursuing new revenue policies and asking our wealthiest residents simply to share equitably in the responsibility of fully funding our schools, helping to shift that responsibility away from working Washingtonians. I’ve strongly supported a wealth tax, which would ask the 4,300 wealthiest Washingtonians to pay tax on their stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and index-traded funds. While we weren’t able to pass that into law this year, we did pass it out of the Senate — I encourage you to watch my speech on that vote.
Besides the budget, we made positive progress on several other major issues. We passed a rent stabilization bill to provide more predictability and stability for renters. House Bill 1217 caps rent increases annually at 7% plus inflation (with a max of 10%), preventing extreme price hikes that force people out of their homes. We passed a great bill from our district’s Rep. Julia Reed to transit-oriented development by requiring denser housing near major transit stops with affordability requirements and offsets. We passed a ‘permit to purchase’ gun safety law sponsored by our district’s Rep. Liz Berry to require training and permitting to purchase a firearm. We passed an overhaul of Washington’s outdated recycling program, also championed by our own Rep. Berry, and expanded access to recycling for more than 500,000 Washingtonians, helping protect our environment. And after 20 years of work, starting with then 36th District legislators, Mary Lou Dickerson and Jeanne Kohl-Welles, and culminating in the last three years, the Legislature finally passed a bill I sponsored to make members of the clergy mandatory reporters of child abuse and neglect. I’m so glad this important measure finally passed the Legislature. These are just a handful of the good bills we passed this year.
While this session is over, I’m still your state senator year-round. Feel free to reach out any time at Noel.Frame@leg.wa.gov, whether it’s with a question you have about a bill we passed, an idea for a new policy we should pursue, or if you need assistance with a state agency.
Thank you so much for reading, and the opportunity to serve you.
Sen. Noel Frame
