Inslee prioritizes behavioral health, housing and public safety in 2024 budget proposal

With the start of the Washington 2024 legislative session less than a month away, Gov. Jay Inslee announced his proposed supplemental budget Wednesday.

The governor is proposing $70.9 billion for the 2024 supplemental budget to invest in big-ticket items such as addressing behavioral health, combating the opioid and fentanyl crisis, investing in housing and homelessness solutions, as well as supporting school workers.

“I want to note some of the numbers we’ll talk about are less important to what we’re actually doing,” Inslee said at a news conference, noting the price tag on the proposal. “And I want to say this because sometimes when you talk about budgets, the numbers seem to be more important at times to the actual reality of what we’re doing in people’s lives. But I want to point out that there’s lives being affected by this budget, and that’s what’s really important. We’re not building pyramids here, but we are building lives.”

The proposal asks for an additional $464 million for behavioral health, adding on to the $1 billion investment made by the Legislature earlier this year for the 2023-25 biennium, to build 110 new beds at behavioral health treatment facilities.

While lawmakers allocated $200 million in the budget this year towards substance abuse disorders, Inslee proposed an additional $64 million for the 2024 session. Inslee’s approach to addressing the opioid and fentanyl epidemic focuses on five areas: education and awareness, health engagement hubs, overdose prevention, treatment access and recovery supports.

Inslee is asking for an additional $140 million for housing and homelessness issues including increasing affordable housing and preventing evictions.

Out of that request, $100 million would be applied to the Rapid Capital Housing Acquisition program. Funding would be used to pay for staff to clean up rights-of-way, as well as to purchase real estate where transitional or permanent housing can be established.

Additionally, $64 million is proposed to raise salaries of para-educators in the state by $3 per hour to recruit and retain a larger workforce. About 32,000 would see an approximate 11% wage increase under the proposal.

Inslee’s budget proposal also includes $17 million to increase the special education funding cap, which would bring the percentage from 15% to 17.25% in the state, with the goal of fully funding districts that have an increased number of students with special needs. If passed, the additional funding would bring the total to $4.4 billion on special education funding for the 2023-25 biennium.

On Monday, the governor rolled out his climate priorities for the session, including $941 million in additional investments for climate action and clean energy.

One of the investments the governor is hoping to make would provide low- and moderate-income residents with a one-time $200 credit on residential electricity bills to offset high oil and gas prices. Approximately 750,000 households in the state would benefit, a spokesperson for the governor’s office told reporters.

The funding would also go toward transitioning diesel school buses to electric zero-emission buses, grants for schools to replace old heating and cooling systems with energy efficient upgrades, salmon and fish passage projects, state highway electric vehicle chargers, and stormwater retrofits.

The supplemental budget did not include new tax proposals, which drew relief from Republicans.

“The good news is that the governor isn’t proposing any new taxes,” said Sen. Lynda Wilson, R-Vancouver, and ranking Republican on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, in a press release. “The bad news is that the taxes he has already passed continue to fuel rapid growth in state spending.

“Washington’s new income tax on capital gains and the ‘hidden gas tax’ of the Climate Commitment Act have enabled the governor to more than double state spending during the decade he has been in office. When people wonder why gas prices are climbing, why groceries and housing are more expensive, and why they have less to spend this Christmas — they need look no further than Olympia.”

Wilson also referred to the $200 energy vouchers for households as “a tacit acknowledgment of the burden the governor’s misguided and misleading policies have placed on the people of Washington.”

The legislative session will begin on Jan. 8, and lawmakers will have just 60 days to pass policy bills along with a supplemental budget. The 2024 session will be Inslee’s last as governor because he is not running for re-election.