Senate Bill S-0167.3 (also cited as S-0167.3 / Senate Bill 5659) adds new statutory sections and amends RCW 82.45.180. The new sections direct every county, city, and town that can approve or deny housing permits to approve enough new homes to eliminate its proportional share of Washington’s statewide housing shortage by 2035. The Department of Commerce must calculate each jurisdiction’s proportional share using the “best available data,” report the number of new homes required by jurisdiction no later than April 1, 2026, and post those results publicly by May 1, 2026. Beginning May 1, 2026, affected jurisdictions must regularly evaluate local codes, ordinances, plans, and regulations for impediments to approving sufficient housing, record total building permit applications and denials, and—if more than 33% of applications are denied—are encouraged to evaluate and address denial factors. Jurisdictions that identify state-enacted requirements as impediments must report those findings to the Department of Commerce, which must forward the reports to the governor, lieutenant governor, chief clerk of the house, and secretary of the senate; the act states the legislature intends to review those reports and consider amending state requirements. The changes constitute new procedural and administrative legal requirements (a new chapter in a new title per Sec. 4) and also modify existing law by amending RCW 82.45.180. The RCW amendment adds a $5 fee on transactions under that chapter where no tax payment is required and establishes procedures for collection, allocation, remittance, and related accounts and distributions; the bill therefore makes fiscal and tax-administration changes in addition to land-use and permitting procedures. The bill also prescribes distribution and use rules for certain funds: the state treasurer must distribute specified funds to county treasurers by the twentieth day of the subsequent month with 50% distributed equally among 39 counties and 50% distributed ratably by county population using the most recent Office of Financial Management statistics. County treasurers must place received funds in a special “real estate and property tax administration assistance account” and may use them for maintaining and operating annual property revaluation systems and electronic processing and reporting systems for real estate excise tax affidavits. Important gaps remain in the extracted text: the chunked material cuts off part of the RCW 82.45.180 amendment so the full collection/remittance language is incomplete; the exact funds or triggering event for the distributions described in the second chunk is not stated; the name of the new title added to the Revised Code is not provided; and no enforcement mechanisms, penalties, or consequences for jurisdictions that fail to meet the 2035 housing-approval requirement are included in the available excerpts.

If enacted, cities, towns, and counties that approve building permits would face clear new duties and public scrutiny: the Department of Commerce will calculate and publish by spring 2026 how many homes each jurisdiction must approve to eliminate its share of the statewide housing shortage by 2035, and beginning May 1, 2026 those jurisdictions must regularly review and be encouraged to change local rules that slow housing, record permit applications and denials, and investigate if denial rates exceed 33 percent. This will likely increase local planning and permitting workload, create public pressure to approve more housing or change codes, and require jurisdictions to prepare reports for the state when state laws are cited as impediments; how failures to meet targets would be handled is not specified in the available text. Separately, the bill continues and clarifies a $5 fee collection tied to real estate transactions and sets up monthly distributions to counties that must be placed in a special county account for property revaluation systems and electronic real estate excise tax processing, with half the funds split equally among 39 counties and half allocated by population. That change is likely to provide steady, designated funding for county property-tax administration and tech systems, but the extracted text cuts off key details about the full fee mechanics and what triggers the “subsequent month” distributions, so some implementation and enforcement details remain unclear.