Senate Bill 5660 (S-1053.1), introduced 02/04/25, amends multiple provisions of the Growth Management Act and related statutes (including RCW 36.70A.070, 36.70A.110, 36.70A.320, 36.93.100, and 36.93.105) and creates a new section. The bill expressly allows extending publicly provided water, sanitary sewer, and stormwater facilities beyond city limits and urban growth areas in specified circumstances where public health or environmental harms exist, the extension will not foster urban growth, and affected communities and governments find the extension economically feasible and prudent. It also requires a minimum “good faith” effort to obtain facility information from public entities. The bill expands and specifies mandatory comprehensive plan elements and related procedural requirements. It amends the land use, housing, capital facilities, utilities, rural, transportation, parks, and climate change and resiliency elements to add detailed content requirements (for example: groundwater protection, environmental justice considerations, measures to reduce wildfire risk, a housing inventory and antidisplacement policies, six-year capital financing plans, and utilities locations/capacities). It requires jurisdictions to identify public owners of facilities and to make good faith efforts to obtain their plans, and it creates a mandatory climate change and resiliency element with greenhouse gas reduction and resiliency subelements. The rural element is revised to permit certain limited, more intensive rural development types (infill, small-scale recreation/tourism, isolated nonresidential uses) subject to capacity confirmations, size limits on retail/food spaces, protections against low-density sprawl, and county requirements to contain and boundary such areas. The transportation element and related six-year plans must be consistent, include multimodal level-of-service and ADA transition plans, and enforce concurrency rules with a defined six-year timeframe for required improvements or financial commitments; some exceptions and limits are specified, including for facilities of statewide significance and island counties. The bill also makes procedural and appeal-related changes. It amends RCW 36.70A.320 to state a presumption of validity for comprehensive plans and development regulations and to place the burden on petitioners to prove noncompliance, and it bars a finding of noncompliance based solely on service extensions approved under RCW 36.70A.110(4). It amends boundary review procedures and timelines (RCW 36.93.100) and lists additional actions not subject to boundary review (RCW 36.93.105), including approved extensions of water or sewer outside corporate boundaries and specified annexation or boundary adjustment actions. The bill tightens requirements for urban growth area planning, including 20-year capacity planning, consultation with cities and federally recognized tribes for UGA changes, and restrictions on expanding UGAs into certain floodplains except in limited circumstances. Important text is missing from the extracted material: full amended language for several cited sections, the new section created by the act, the department named for guideline duties under RCW 70A.45.120, and some truncated subsections, so specific operative details and all cross-references are uncertain from the provided excerpts.

If enacted, the law would require counties and cities to do more detailed planning and analysis up front—adding expanded land use, housing, capital facilities, utilities, rural, transportation, and climate/resiliency elements, using OFM population forecasts, producing six‑year financing plans, and making quantified environmental findings for some actions. It would also make it easier in narrowly defined cases to extend public water, sanitary sewer, and stormwater outside city and urban growth area boundaries to address public health or environmental harms, provided the extension won’t encourage urban growth, is economically feasible over the planning horizon, and existing providers confirm they have capacity; certain approved service extensions would be insulated from boundary review and some appeals. Rural areas could allow limited more intensive uses and small retail/food footprints with strict size and service-capacity limits, and urban growth area expansions would face tighter conditions, including floodplain restrictions and requirements to preserve resource lands. The people and organizations most affected are county and city planning departments (more staff time, technical studies, and possible consultant costs to meet new element, financing, and analysis requirements), special purpose districts and utilities (expected to respond to information requests and confirm service capacity, which could require staff time or investment), and rural landowners or developers (who may gain limited new development opportunities but face service-availability checks, size limits, and tighter rules). Local governments may also see somewhat lower legal exposure for certain implementing actions, while the need for quantified SEPA analyses and detailed feasibility findings creates additional upfront cost and uncertainty; several important implementation details and other amended sections were not included in the extracted text, so how some provisions will work in practice remains unclear.