An ambitious bill limiting the ability of local cities and counties to require off-street parking stalls in new development cleared its first hurdle in the Washington State House on Friday, but it was significantly watered down in the process. The amendments adopted in the House’s Local Government Committee significantly scale back the scope of Senate Bill 5184, and come on the heels of a public hearing that brought out city representatives from across the state who voiced concerns about losing the ability to mandate an arbitrary number of parking stalls.
SB 5184 sets a new ceiling for parking requirements at 0.5 stalls for multifamily residential buildings and one stall for every 1,000 square feet of commercial space. The bill, sponsored by Senator Jessica Bateman (D-22nd, Olympia), seeks to put the kibosh on high off-street parking requirements that add costs to both homebuilding and discourage walkable retail development.
Bateman’s bill would also remove all minimum parking requirements for a broad number of facilities, including affordable housing developments, senior housing, child care centers, and commercial spaces in mixed-use developments, where parking demand is less and added building costs particularly damaging.
An amendment already adopted on the Senate floor exempted cities with a population under 20,000, but that exemption was expanded on Friday to cover cities with fewer than 30,000 people. The move drops several major Puget Sound cities where significant regional public transit investments are coming online or will soon, including Mountlake Terrace, Kenmore, and Mercer Island.
Even more impactfully, cities with fewer than 100,000 residents would have three full years to comply with the law. That means cities ranging in size from Lynnwood to Kirkland wouldn’t have to recalibrate their parking mandates until mid-2028. For cities over 100,000, the bill would go into effect in 18 months, which still means the full effect of the bill wouldn’t be seen until early 2027, as the state faces a worsening housing affordability crisis.
On top of those changes, an exemption for businesses that sell alcohol from parking mandates was removed from the bill, meaning cities and counties of any size would continue to retain the ability to require new bars, breweries, and wineries to come with dedicated off-street parking. Impaired driving remains a major cause of deadly crashes and serious-injury collisions on Washington’s roadways.
Notably, the bill still applies to unincorporated county land, no matter the size of the county. That’s likely to lead to the strange situation where areas outside cities in areas like Kitsap County have more stringent ceiling on parking mandates than growth centers like Bainbridge Island.
The bill faced a tough vote in the House’s Local Government Committee, which only has seven members: four Democrats, and three Republicans. On the Senate side, the bill was heard in the Housing Committee, which has a larger margin of Democrats to Republicans, giving any individual committee member less leverage to force specific changes.
Representative Victoria Hunt (D-5th, Issaquah), a former Issaquah Councilmember, raised issues with the bill at a hearing earlier this month, and many of the changes adopted in committee appear to have been necessary to secure her vote.
“I have heard concerns from the cities in my district, and so have been interested in some potential changes,” Hunt said at that hearing.
In the end, it was Hunt’s amendment that added the long implementation timelines to the bill, and stripped out the provision related to alcohol-related businesses. Hunt’s amendment also dropped an exemption for smaller commercial spaces from 5,000 square feet to 3,000 square feet, and a separate amendment from Rep. Janice Zahn (D-41st, Bellevue) raised the new ceiling for all commercial spaces from one stall per every 1,000 square feet to two.
“We need to work on making sure that our families have more options for more housing in our communities where they work. At the same time, local elected officials need tools to actually implement these policies,” Hunt said in introducing her amendment. She offered no justification for continuing to allow required parking with alcohol-focused businesses.
But it was Rep. David Stuebe (R-17th, Washougal), the only Republican in the committee to vote for the bill, who amended it to exempt cities with populations up to 30,000. That move followed public testimony from elected officials and planning staff in Moses Lake (pop. 27,070), Covington (pop. 22,000) and Port Orchard (pop. 18,300) opposing the bill. Along with those cities, Washougal itself is just below the 20,000 population threshold and likely would have had to comply within a few years. Stuebe is currently Washougal’s Mayor.
“We strongly believe that parking requirements should be tailored by local governments who have an intimate understanding of their community’s specific needs,” Andrew Johnson, a senior planner with the City of Covington, told the committee. “The limited parking requirements proposed in this bill may be suitable in areas served by transit, but the city of Covington remains a largely auto-centric community.”
But during that same hearing, Bateman offered a powerful response to the idea that only the most transit-connected communities in Washington should be the focus of parking reform.
“The utilization of multimodal transit or mass transit is predicated on density,” Bateman said. “You do not get the utilization unless you have the underlying density. We’re building homes that will last 50 years. And if you wait for the transit to be available to align these tools that will accelerate and make housing construction feasible, we will not achieve the outcome that we’re looking for.”
Many local elected officials appeared very reluctant to internalize Batemen’s message, but some were receptive and on the same page. Plenty of current and former elected officials have also been pushing for a relaxation of parking mandates.
“Vancouver is both an urban and a suburban city, we have come to understand the high costs our parking requirements place on developers of commercial and residential properties,” Vancouver Councilmember Ty Stober told the committee. “We also understand our standards are not based on objective criteria, but on guesses and copying of other jurisdictions.”
Committee chair Rep. Davina Duerr (D-1st, Bothell) celebrated the big step forward for parking reform in Washington, despite the changes adopted.
“This is a really, really important bill,” Duerr said. “We’ve been working really hard over the last few years to try to find ways to make housing more affordable, and this is one of the last critical pieces. We know that land is really, really expensive, and we’re spending and requiring developers to spend a lot of their land to provide parking. To find a balance where we have parking, but not more than we need, will allow affordable housing to be built. And I don’t know, I think everyone’s clear that housing people is more important than housing cars.”
On social media, Bateman also provided a glass-half-full perspective on her bill. “Although the parking reform bill was modified in committee, it’s still an improvement over the status quo. And, two years ago this bill would have been a nonstarter,” she wrote on Bluesky. “Thank you housing advocates for changing the narrative!”
Some big steps still remain. SB 5184 needs to make it off the House floor by April 16, and then any changes made in the House will need to be approved by the Senate by April 27, the last day of this year’s legislative session.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
