The city of Renton saw many of its priorities addressed during the Washington state legislative session this year, despite budget shortfalls.
Renton Government Affairs Manager Eric Perry is the newly-appointed advocate for Renton’s concerns at the local, state and federal government levels. His duties are to oversee, direct and manage the city’s intergovernmental efforts and relationships.
Prior to the beginning of the legislative session, which ran from January to April this year, he worked with the city to create a legislative agenda.
“Which is essentially what I would describe as the guardrails, the direction that I have from the mayor and from city council and staff and community,” Perry said.
Perry said this was a very challenging legislative session because the state was facing a “large budgetary shortfall” across the board. He said revenue forecasts, expired federal funding and economic pressure from interest rates and inflation helped contribute to budget issues for the state.
“The federal government was providing x amount of dollars, say for a highway. That is not necessarily as guaranteed as it was last year or two years ago,” Perry said. “That created a really challenging budget environment that we had to navigate.”
The city did receive $1.5 million for Legacy Square construction through Local and Community Projects Funding. He said they also advocated to fully fund ongoing construction on the I-405 to Bellevue Widening Project.
“That was facing approximately a $90 million shortfall for current construction and so the concern was that if we didn’t fully fund work that is already happening, it would create some significant delays to the project,” Perry said.
Beyond budgeting, Perry said their biggest win was House Bill 2015 to improve public safety funding. The bill authorizes the creation of a new public safety grant program for local agencies to recruit and retain police officers by paying for 75 percent of a new officer’s salary for up to three years. He said the other piece of that bill would allow cities and counties to create a 0.1 percent sales tax for public safety matters.
“Washington is 51st in the nation for law enforcement as it relates to where staffing levels should be at, per capita,” Perry said. “The state as a whole has a large hill to climb in getting our officer levels to a place where they should be.”
Perry said this year in House Bill 1587, the state “more formalized” the Renton Promise program, a last-mile-in-funding measure for any high school graduate of a Renton school to attend Renton Technical College. The program is funded by a $200,000 fund from the city of Renton and a matching amount from the state.
“It was a really big win because it switched over from a pilot program with an uncertain future to a more formalized program now,” Perry said. “So we can ensure that all Renton graduates who want to pursue higher education at RTC for a variety of their different certificates and programs can do so without having to worry about the financial aspect of that.”
Other “wins” Perry listed were in transportation and regional connectivity, pedestrian and bike safety, behavioral and mental health services, refugee and immigrant assistance and alternative response programs.
Perry said one “victim” of the budget shortfalls was a project to create a direct access ramp from North 8th Street onto I-405. He said the state-allocated roughly $2 million to the Washington Department of Transportation to try to come up with practical solutions to solve the issue quickly and at a lower cost, but the money was cut.
Perry also said, in an ideal world, they would like to see more funding for the programs they supported such as homeless outreach and local government road development.
“Given the tight budgets that we were facing at the state level, we feel pretty good coming out of it,” Perry said. “It could have been a total cut situation where they only made cuts to overcome the shortfalls, so we are grateful that the state made investments this year to the degree that they were able to do so.”
