House counterproposal removes e-bike tax, adds Missing Link exemption to Senate funding bill

The Washington State House of Representatives is debating their response to the Senate's transportation funding bill this week, and the latest version (PDF) not only removes the e-bike tax but also exempts the Ballard Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail from environmental review. The House still needs to pass their modified version of the Senate bill, then the two chambers will need to work out the differences before each votes again on a final compromise bill.

The House Transportation Committee is holding a public hearing Tuesday (today) and could take action as soon as Wednesday. The group that e-biked from Seattle to Olympia made it successfully and testified against in-person against taxing e-bikes.

The good news is that the e-bike tax is nowhere to be found in the House striking amendment, their rewrite of the Senate's bill. We have argued that an e-bike tax could be devastating to the state's bike shops, which were already struggling even before Trump's tariffs added costs and lots of uncertainty to the U.S. bicycle industry.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was seeing the Missing Link bill, which passed the House before failing to get a committee vote in the Senate, find new life as a rider on the House version of the funding bill. Ryan Packer spotted the addition this morning. The provision is written narrowly so as to only apply to rail-trail projects in the City of Seattle under 10 acres. As we argued previously, SEPA is an important tool to limiting damage from major public works projects, but the Missing Link is an outlier due to its extensive court delays spanning decades that have very little to do with the trail itself. While freeway megaprojects with massive budgets and huge environmental impacts sail through the SEPA process with relative ease, this little trail has been caught in an endless gyre of a legal process clearly not created for such a small thing as a rail trail through an unofficial industrial parking lot. For half a decade, lawyers have been arguing about legal standing and the perception of bias by the Seattle Hearing Examiner, not about whether the short biking and walking trail would be safe or have a negative impact on the environment. The city already created a massive environmental impact statement that goes into absurd detail about the trail. It is appropriate for legislators to step in and say, We've wasted enough time on this one."

Though the latest House version of the bill has some promising stuff, there's still a lot that can happen before any of this becomes law, so stay tuned.