Tumwater approves legislative priorities in 2024 

Tumwater City Council adopted its legislative agenda for the State Legislature’s 2024 session. 

The 2024 legislative agenda, a document thatwhich guides the city’s funding requests to the legislature, was approved on Tuesday, December 5, as part of the council’s consent agenda. 

The same priorities from this year are being carried over to next year’s legislative agenda as only one of the city’s five requests was approved by the legislature this year. 

The other four remaining requests include the following: 

• $6.6 million for the engineering and permitting of an extension to E Street connecting Capitol Boulevard and Cleveland Avenue,  
• $5 million for the construction of two roundabouts in the Tumwater Boulevard/I-5 Interchange, 
• $2.8 million for the redevelopment of the vacated State Department of Transportation Regional Office, and  
• $2 million for the acquisition of mitigation land in support of the Bush Prairie Habitat Conservation Plan. 

The document also contains statewide policies that the city supports. Tumwater supports modifying the state’s 1% limit to property tax increases and indexing the percentage cap to an inflation index.  

The city is also in favor of amending the law to remove the limit on the number of renewals a Transportation Benefit District could make. Such districts can only be renewed once after its initial 10-year term based on current law.