The Kirkland City Council has set the city’s priorities for the 2017 Washington state legislative session, scheduled for Jan. 9 through April 21.

On Oct. 18, the council unanimously passed Resolution R-5215, which lays out what the city’s position is on a variety of issues relevant to the State Legislature.

City of Kirkland Intergovernmental Relations Manager Lorrie McKay distributed a finalized list of the priorities at the Oct. 18 council meeting after discussing what they should be with the council at its Oct. 4 meeting.

The city has set forward seven legislative priorities, as follows:

• Kirkland supports new funding and policy tools to address homelessness and create more affordable housing, such as restoring the Housing Trust Fund (HTF) to pre-recession levels, adding affordable housing to the list of eligible projects that can be funded by Real Estate Excise Tax (REET) 1 and REET 2, and extending document recording fee for housing (eliminate sunset) and increasing the fee.
• Kirkland supports allowing Kingsgate Park and Ride to be used for an affordable housing Transit Oriented Development.
• Kirkland supports adequate and sustainable funding to maintain high-quality statewide training for law enforcement personnel.
• Kirkland supports allowing local jurisdictions the option to set a lower taxing limit for a Metropolitan Park District (MPD).
• Kirkland supports capital or transportation budget funding for a multimodal safety improvement project connecting the Cross Kirkland Corridor with the Redmond Central Connector.
• Kirkland supports allowing both the state and local governments the option of replacing the property tax cap, currently fixed at one percent, with a cap that is indexed to both population growth and inflation.
• Kirkland supports updates to the Public Records Act that will exempt non-appointed volunteers from records requests (except for responsive records already retained by the jurisdiction), establish a nominal fee for filing records requests and a per document charge for electronic records and create a path to predictability on fines for jurisdictions that make good faith efforts to comply with records requests.