Senate Bill 5699 amends RCW 36.70A.070 and revises what must be included in county and city comprehensive plans. The bill expands and clarifies required plan elements and procedures—including land use, housing, capital facilities, utilities, rural, transportation, park and recreation, and a new climate change and resiliency element—and requires plans to be internally consistent, map‑based, and adopted with public participation as provided in RCW 36.70A.140. The amendment creates new substantive and procedural requirements. It adds detailed housing element duties (inventories and projections for various income levels and emergency/permanent supportive housing, identification of sufficient land capacity, programs to achieve housing availability, documentation of barriers, identification of local policies causing racially disparate impacts and displacement, and required antidisplacement policies). It tightens capital facilities and utilities elements (inventories, six‑year financing plans, inclusion of green infrastructure, and a required “good faith effort” to consult public entities—at minimum by reviewing their plans and emailing and calling staff—with failure to include information after a good faith effort not constituting noncompliance). It specifies rural development controls (logical outer boundary criteria, limits on types and sizes of retail/food service and other rural uses, a definition of essential rural retail services, and prohibitions on large industrial or resort uses except as allowed elsewhere), transportation and concurrency rules (local LOS standards, a six‑year concurrency financing commitment, mitigation options including active transportation and transit, ten‑year forecasts, finance coordination, and an ADA transition plan), and requires a GHG reduction subelement and resiliency subelement with standards for reducing emissions and prioritizing benefits to overburdened communities. The bill also limits administrative or judicial appeals for certain nonproject actions that increase housing capacity or implement department‑specified GHG measures, unless there is a probable significant adverse impact on fish habitat. This is a modification of existing law that imposes new planning duties, procedural requirements, development controls, and appeal limits rather than creating new criminal penalties. Some text in the provided excerpts is incomplete or refers to other subsections and laws not fully included here (for example, the description of limited areas of more intensive rural development and certain cross‑references), so a full accounting of all changes and exact statutory language cannot be confirmed from the extracted material alone.

If enacted, the bill would make cities and counties add many new studies, policies, and rules to their comprehensive plans—covering housing needs and antidisplacement measures, wildfire risk reduction, groundwater protection, green infrastructure and six-year capital financing, detailed utility and transportation capacity and multimodal level-of-service standards, a climate change and resiliency element with greenhouse gas reduction actions, and tighter controls on rural development including retail size limits and logical outer boundaries. In practice this means local governments will need more staff time, technical work, and coordination with special purpose districts and state agencies to gather information, produce financing plans, and adopt new regulations; they must at least consult public entities’ facility plans and email and call staff, and if information can’t be obtained after that “good faith” effort it won’t by itself trigger a finding of noncompliance. The bill also narrows opportunities for appeals of some nonproject actions that expand housing capacity or implement department-specified GHG measures, which could lower litigation risk for local governments implementing those policies. The groups most affected are counties and cities (especially rural counties), special purpose districts and utility providers, DOT and public transit agencies, developers, and rural residents. Local governments may face increased costs and deadlines to produce inventories, resiliency and ADA transition plans, and sixand ten-year finance programs, and they will need to secure or demonstrate funding commitments for transportation concurrency within six years or provide mitigation strategies; developers in rural areas may see size and use limits, must confirm service capacity before approvals, and could face slower or constrained approvals. Some important implementation details and certain rural development subparts are not included in the extracted facts, so exact procedural steps and limits remain unclear.