Senator Jesse Salomon Interview Transcript

This is a transcript of an interview with State Senator Jesse Salomon from September 3, 2025. This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

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 had a meeting or a retreat before the session started, and we prioritized affordable housing and education.

And so we said, we are going to raise the education budget regardless of the cuts. And we're going to work on housing affordability.

And I was tasked as chair of the local government Committee, which deals with a lot of the housing jurisdictions, as well as as a member of the housing committee, to work on that piece.

So that was the overarching picture. You know, I had four bills that I passed. One of them, most relevant to this particular conversation, was as chair of the Joint Legislative and Audit Review Committee, myself. 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.

But every tax preference has a fan and a lobbyist, so it's hard.

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 and K12 and whatnot.

OJM: It was kind of a fight, I saw, like, it seemed like. At least my impression was the Republicans weren't super happy about it.

SJS: …The JLARC bill was sort of one of several bills that raised revenue… It was roughly a half and half split between cuts and revenue.

A little more revenue than cuts… so there are things like bumping up the capital gains tax.

The estate tax was reconfigured so that instead of having three tiers, we created five tiers, and then the upper marginal rates went much higher.

And so in plain speak, if you're very wealthy, you're going to pay more when you pass it on. So that brings in revenue for schools.

OJM: And then, you know, for the housing side of it, I did see you had like a permitting reform or maybe 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 divide property, 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.

But if you look at what California did under the leadership of Scott Weiner… who's the senator from San Francisco, who's running for Nancy Pelosi's old seat.

You know, he led the charge on that stuff there.

And I've actually been talking to him and we've been working somewhat in tandem on this to do it here as well.

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. We just can't have that.…

That being said, I also worked on a bill around rental algorithms, because we saw that landlords were coordinating through the use of software to essentially collude to drive up rental prices.

Well, A, that's illegal, and B, there was no real clear law against it.

So I drafted a law and it passed all the way to the house floor, so final point in the process there.

And then the attorney general announced a lawsuit against the software manufacturer.

So we put that bill on hold just because you can only pass so many bills off the floor.

And so we were like, maybe we'll just wait and see how that goes.

Not my decision, but, you know.

So there's a whole set, you know, of approaches here.

OJM: Now, I wasn't able to figure out, and I don't know enough about housing policy or land use policy. Was the bill that you sponsored, would that have put the builder's remedy in place?

SJS: That was in the bill. And then we took that out because it was in a different bill, so there was no point in doing it twice.

I worked pretty closely with Senator Jessica Bateman, who did the housing stuff, and she had that in one of her bills.

OJM: And so now we do have the builder’s remedy?

SJS: I believe so.

One of the things that's hard to track is like, we passed 300 Senate bills off the floor and then it's like, we got sort of you know, our hands are off at that point.

And it's like, which one's passed and which ones didn't and what version?

It's like, it's kind of hard to track.

But yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm like 99.9% sure that it's in her, I think it's 5218.

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 to some degree.

And I like to do bills that sort of fly under the radar, but have a big impact.

And I was the interim chair of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources before I moved over to local government, and so I helped organize a tour.

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.

They'd build dams in the rivers for the logs to stack up on.

These are small rivers, right?

And then they'd wait for enough water to come and they'd blow up the dams and logs would shoot through. And so they stripped every kind of biological material out of the river.

It was stripped down to bedrock, so it looked like a sidewalk.

Things don't live in that, right?

So they were like, we're trying to rehab these rivers, but we have some impediments structurally, and I'm like, so what are they?

They said, well, if we could source the right kind of, we're trying to restore to the natural order of the river.

And a lot of that, it means like you have to have wood in there to slow down the volume of the water and things like that.

And you have to have like big trees with the root wads intact. And it's really hard for us 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.

So long story short, 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 … sort of not doing the best practices for restoration because of their inability to source that material.

I'm like, 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.

It's actually an existential thing.

So to the point where people no longer believe that democratic politics or democratic governments work, and they get more likely to go with… this neo-fascism that we're seeing.

And so it's actually really critical that we do a good, surgical job.

And so I think that goes for us, specifically in blue areas public safety, you can't have people laying out, using drugs everywhere, occupying the parks and stuff, and it's not really helpful to them for us to turn a blind eye and just let them die of fentanyl.

So we have to do more in terms of treatment, getting them into treatment, and … we're going to enforce a standard where we can't just have this happen.

You know, I was on 145th shopping at Walgreens, and some people just came in and … just literally opened the refrigerator doors and stole stuff. And the staff, they're not allowed to say anything because they don't want to get in the dangerous situation.

And then you have all these stores like Fred Meyer locally shutting down, that's the result of this.

And we need to get a handle on that. And doesn't have to mean in jail, but we can't just keep turning a blind eye.

OJM: I guess that kind of segues into 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 and then the second thing is, 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? Looking back at the 2025 session 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.

And what we're seeing is 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.

And so I've been working with veterans, Special Forces…

And it's really heartbreaking to… see their struggles.

You know, war is not something that we can imagine unless we've been there.

The impact on the brain is just devastating.

And they're asking for help.

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…

I have heard from people who are saying this has prevented suicide.

And… you can almost watch the number of suicides that are happening until we can pass this here.

And so that breaks my heart.

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.

And I hope that gets the legislature off their rear ends on this, because Texas, for God's sake, just passed $50 million for ibogaine research.

Rick Perry, the former governor, a conservative, who also came at this through the veterans angle, is really a supporter.

He drove that through.

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. Like, there's a playbook. It's not new.

So this is sort of a DEFCON four-level situation…

And so we need to be extremely strategic about this, and doing the same things, circular firing squads on the left, not helpful, right?

Echo chambers, not helpful.

And when I see people protesting on 65th over I5, like, well, who are you talking to? You're communicating with people who agree with you.

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.

So I think it's more critical than ever that we're strategic, and that we're not canceling each other for saying the wrong thing and being a little bit more open… a little more experimental in policy-making.

Otherwise, I just don't think we get another shot at it, honestly.

And I don't know what's going to happen in the 2026 election-wise… He's going to make a play in the worst way. So we got to be ready for that.