Coffee with Senator Jesse Salomon
State Senator Jesse Salomon sat down for coffee to talk about the 2025 legislative session. This transcript was edited for clarity and length and the full transcript is available online.
Senator Jesse Salomon sat down to talk about the 2025 legislative session over cup of coffee at the Drumlin espresso bar in Ridgecrest.
Salomon was first elected to the Senate in 2018 and was appointed by the Senate Democratic Caucus chair of the Local Government Committee for the 2025 legislative session. Salomon represents the 32nd district, which encompasses parts of Seattle, Shoreline, Edmonds, Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, and Woodway.
Salomon was the primary sponsor of four bills signed into law in the 2025 session:
ESSB 5794: Closed obsolete tax loopholes in a year of budget austerity. It narrowly passed amid Republican and business opposition.
SSB 5157: Allows DNR to sell habitat restoration materials (like logs with root wads) directly instead of at auction, streamlining projects. It passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support.
ESSB 5202: Updates judicial protection orders, strengthening safeguards for abuse survivors with e-filing, firearm restrictions, streamlined renewals, and other reforms.
ESSB 5611: Cut red tape to speed up housing development by enforcing permit review timelines and requiring performance reports. It passed nearly unanimously.
Oliver J. Moffat: How did the session go? What were the highlights for you?
Sen. Jesse Salomon: The session was intense.
We had a huge budget shortfall, and it started with a question of, do we raise especially progressive revenue? Do we cut our budgets to meet the shortfall?
Also, this is happening at a time when we're hearing very loudly from school districts that they're in a serious crunch.
And so we in the Senate Democratic caucus… we said, we are going to raise the education budget regardless of the cuts. And we're going to work on housing affordability…
I had four bills that I passed.
One of them… was as chair of the Joint Legislative and Audit Review Committee…
We look at tax breaks or tax loopholes, you could call them, that have been passed over decades and examined them to see if they're meeting their stated desired outcome, and then, in theory, we close them, if not…
This was a window of opportunity to start closing some of those loopholes because there was this huge crunch.
And so I was able to sponsor a bill that raised, I think it was a $250 million per biennium by closing those loopholes and bringing in the tax revenue.
And that goes for schools…
OJM: And then for the housing side of it, I did see you had a permitting accountability bill. Can you talk about that?
SJS: Yeah, I had several. I had actually, I think, 11 bills on housing affordability and supply.
The one that I passed, it’s a very technical bill around… how planners work… to allow family housing.
I think that the bigger thing is it was part of a package where we're taking the approach that it's too hard and there are too many hoops to jump through to create affordable housing, and that drives up the cost.
And now traditionally, that's maybe not a super liberal approach to things…
And I've been behind that for a number of years now, because if the average home in King County is like $800,000, so many people are priced out.…
OJM: I think let's see if I remember correctly. There were also a couple of other bills. One of them was with restoration materials.
SJS: That's another interest of mine: environmental issues. I've focused on salmon restoration…
And I like to do bills that sort of fly under the radar, but have a big impact…
We went to this place in Southwest Washington that was doing amazing things with rehabilitating rivers that had been turned into highways for logging in the past. So what they did was they dynamited the rivers, they straightened them out…
It was stripped down to bedrock, so it looked like a sidewalk. Things don't live in that…
You have to have wood in there to slow down the volume of the water…
And you have to have like big trees with the root wads intact. And it's really hard… to source those.
But the Department of Natural Resources has those, but they have to go to bid and it's just this huge long process…
The bill says, up to $250,000 worth of wood material, you can sell directly to these salmon enhancement nonprofits for these projects.
Because they've been… not doing the best practices for restoration because of their inability to source that material…
For all the money that we're spending, we have this stupid thing that doesn't allow them to do that.
So my whole point is we need to make government work. And that's one way to do it…
OJM: The fourth bill, which, honestly, it's a little bit in the weeds for me, but it had to do with judicial protection orders.
SJS: That’s domestic violence.
So I've been working a lot with Representative Lauren Davis on domestic violence issues.
You know, she works on that and on mental health and their intersections.
So there's too much for one person to do there…
So this bill, along with the theme of making government work, it just makes it more user-friendly for somebody who's a victim of domestic violence to access protection orders.
And then, and I think the details could be a little boring and weedy…
But… if you have a protection order against you, like, let's say you’ve been charged with domestic violence abusing somebody, and you try to get an unregistered ghost gun. Like, a 3D gun or something that doesn't have a serial number, that would be a felony.
And so that had some Republican support, some bipartisan support, but mostly Democratic support.
In terms of gun responsibility, we have rights, we have responsibilities, I think that goes along with it.
So we're trying to figure out where are the most dangerous intersection points of violence, and solve those.
And so for another example, I passed a bill… with a mandatory ten-day waiting period and mandatory training for firearm purchase.
That passed in a different bill from the House.
That was under the permit-to-purchase bill…
So gun violence prevention is something that I work on as well.
OJM: Anything else that you want to share with folks?
SJS: You know, so there's another issue that I'm interested in around mental health, and you're starting to see it, oddly enough, get popularized in Republican circles, because veterans are asking for different treatments for PTSD…
So what we're seeing is different psychedelics like psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms, ibogaine, ayahuasca, things like that are proving to be groundbreaking for some people.
And so I've been running bills trying to create an adult support use system here…
We have a VA system that has no new PTSD treatment in the last 20 years.
And yet we have something here that veterans are traveling to other countries to get treated for and coming back and saying this is amazing…
So for the last four years, I've been trying to get that online here. And so I am very passionate about that.
OJM: And then I don't think it was this session, but maybe last session, you got funding for ibogaine studies at UW.
SJS: So two years ago, I passed a bill on psilocybin, so think magic mushrooms or whatever you want to call them, where we got about $2 million dollars for a study at the University of Washington, which we then augmented with ibogaine funding the next year. So they're studying both.
And basically the criteria is first responders who have PTSD and alcohol use disorder, alcoholism.
Because a lot of the studies for psychedelics have excluded people with what we call co-occurring disorders, so PTSD and addiction.
But the reality is they travel together. People treat their PTSD with addiction when they self-medicate. And so you really got to study the interaction…
I'm quite optimistic that there's going to be a very positive signal for that…
OJM: Anything else you want to share?
SJS: We are in unprecedented times. Where Donald Trump is putting National Guard troops into cities for no justifiable reason, and it's obviously an attempt at moving towards autocracy.
It's what every autocratic leader has done…
And so we need to be extremely strategic about this…
Circular firing squads on the left, not helpful, right? Echo chambers, not helpful… There's no point in that.
Go out and talk to people on the margins.
Go out and talk to conservatives who only learn about you from conservative podcasts and where you're demonized and turn into something you're not.
The fundamental antidote to autocracy is two things:
Human connection, getting to know each other, you will see they're not so bad, they will see you're not so bad. And it brings down the tension.
And then, I think, a well-functioning government. That's the left's forte, right? We're never going to be meaner or nastier, but we can be more constructive.
And that's attractive to people. And if we attract enough people, it will shift the tide…
Otherwise, I just don't think we get another shot at it, honestly.