Before Democrats passed the new 9.9% income tax on income above $1 million, the Department of Revenue warned lawmakers that the bill was complicated enough to create administrative and legal headaches.

In a January email to Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, DOR warned that the complexity could make the tax harder to explain in litigation and “could give rise to additional challenges” beyond the existing legal fight over Washington’s income-tax authority.

DOR also warned that identifying taxpayers who owe the tax could be difficult and could lead to underreporting during the first few years. The agency recommended changes, including removing federal long-term capital gains and losses from the tax calculation and closing a residency loophole. Not all of those recommendations made it into the final law.

And this wasn’t some minor tweak to the tax code. ESSB 6346 created a new 9.9% tax beginning in 2028 while also making a series of other changes to Washington’s tax system. DOR now describes the legislation as a “large, multifaceted” law that will take several years to implement.

That leaves taxpayers with a pretty straightforward question: If the state’s own tax experts were warning lawmakers about problems before passage, why was the Legislature in such a hurry to pass it?

Apparently, the answer was: pass the tax now, figure out the details later.

And now DOR is doing exactly that. The advisory workgroup created by the law is still working through technical and administrative questions, with reports due in December 2026 and December 2027.

Nothing says “fully vetted” quite like years of work after the vote to figure out how the law is actually going to work. Read more at The Center Square.

In a new op-ed, Meg Goudy, director of the Bill & Milly Kay Baldwin Center for Education at the Mountain States Policy Center, argues that Washington taxpayers deserve more transparency when government unions negotiate wages, benefits and pensions -something Shift WA has long said ourselves.

With an October 1 deadline approaching for state employee unions to submit ratified contracts for consideration in the next budget cycle, Goudy points out that these agreements can make up a significant share of government spending. Yet much of the bargaining happens behind closed doors.

Washington has strong public-records and open-meetings laws, but collective bargaining was carved out of those requirements. Goudy also highlights a 2025 Washington Supreme Court ruling that kept collective bargaining agreements shielded from public-records disclosure until the Legislature funds them and the governor signs the budget.

That means taxpayers ultimately pay the bill, but don’t necessarily get to see the deal until long after the negotiations are over.

Goudy points to Idaho, Lincoln County and Spokane as examples of efforts to bring more transparency to public-sector bargaining. In Washington, however, current law makes open negotiations a permissive subject, meaning both sides have to agree to open the doors.

Goudy argues that wages, benefits and pensions paid with taxpayer dollars should be negotiated where the public can watch — or at least before a neutral body rather than entirely behind closed doors.

The public may be the employer, but under Washington’s current system, it doesn’t get much of a seat at the bargaining table. Read more at The Center Square.

Let’s Go Washington is back with another initiative, this time targeting transparency in Washington’s courts.

The proposed measure would amend the Public Records Act to include Washington’s trial courts, Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, along with judges, justices, clerks and court personnel. LGW argues that if the law applies to individual legislators, the judiciary should not be exempt simply because it is a separate branch of government.

“Judges are elected officials,” LGW founder Brian Heywood said, arguing that voters should be able to see the records behind decisions made by public officials.

The group points to a 2018 ruling by Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Lanese, who found that the Public Records Act applies to the offices of state senators and representatives. LGW says the same principle should extend to the courts – Washington voters should have greater access to information about how judges and courts reach decisions that affect the public.

Of course, LGW also has three initiatives on the November ballot: Initiative 645, which would repeal the state’s new income tax; Initiative 001, addressing parental rights in schools; and Initiative 638, concerning eligibility for girls’ sports. Read more at Seattle Red.

One of the most troubling revelations in a recent Seattle Times story is coming from a former Biden administration official. Jen Smyers, former deputy director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, acknowledged that some families sent their children across the southern border alone because children were among the migrants getting through.

The result was a dramatic increase in unaccompanied minors arriving in Washington. The number released to sponsors in the state jumped from 237 in fiscal year 2020 to 1,112 the following year. A Washington DSHS report shows that 5,463 unaccompanied children were released to sponsors in Washington between 2020 and 2025, including 1,460 in fiscal year 2024.

These weren’t simply young migrants traveling on their own. They were children being sent through one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes without their parents.

And what happened after they arrived raises even more questions. The DSHS report says the federal government does not consider a sponsor’s immigration status, and sponsors are often undocumented. The Trump administration has found that Biden-era vetting allowed some children to be placed with sponsors who were smugglers or sex traffickers.

Whatever someone’s views on immigration policy, every decent person should be able to agree that when Democrats deliberately created a system where children became the easiest way into the country, it raised obvious concerns about who may exploit them along the way — and who they are ultimately being handed over to. Tragically, the Biden administration appear to have dismissed and/or ignored these concerns.

Washington saw the consequences firsthand. King County went from receiving 98 unaccompanied children in 2020 to 666 in 2022, while Snohomish County received between 144 and 161 children annually from 2021 through 2024.

When children become the easiest people to get through the border, they’re not just being given a path into America — they’re being exposed to the people willing to exploit that vulnerability. Read more at the Seattle Times.

Seattle’s controversial Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) law was supposed to give prosecutors another tool for dealing with people arrested for drug-related activity in the city’s most entrenched crime and drug hotspots. Instead, the policy has been largely shelved under Mayor Katie Wilson and City Attorney Erika Evans.

The numbers are striking: 112 SODA orders were issued in 2025. By August 2026, just one had been issued all year.

Former City Attorney Ann Davison, who helped create the law, argues Seattle abandoned the policy before it had a fair chance to work. She says SODA was deliberately limited to small portions of Belltown, Pioneer Square, the Chinatown-International District, Capitol Hill, Beacon Hill and the University District—less than 1% of Seattle’s land area.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, another SODA supporter, says the city is simply refusing to use a tool lawmakers intentionally put in the enforcement toolbox.

But current leadership sees things differently. Evans argues that banning someone from one neighborhood doesn’t address the underlying criminal behavior—it simply pushes the problem somewhere else. Wilson has similarly argued that exclusion orders can displace drug activity rather than solve addiction, crime and disorder.

The debate is further complicated by the lack of usable data proving either side right. Overdose deaths declined by roughly 30% in four areas containing SODA zones from 2024 to 2025, but EMS-treated overdoses declined only about 1%. Public health officials caution that the data doesn’t line up neatly with SODA boundaries and that numerous other factors—including naloxone access, treatment availability, changes in the drug supply and the population at risk—could explain the changes.

So Seattle has managed to create a particularly convenient policy experiment: pass a law designed to address open-air drug markets, barely enforce it, and then argue about whether the law works. Read more at KUOW.

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