HB1657 – Reducing the emissions and the safety risks of insufficient overnight commercial truck parking through tax incentives.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Griffey (R; 35th District; Mason County)
Current status – Had a hearing in Finance Tuesday January 25th at 1:30. Amended to increase the minimum qualifying parking space dimensions to 12 feet wide and 70 feet long, and passed out of committee February 4th. Referred to Rules February 7th; still there at cutoff.
Next step would be – Dead bill.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Comments –
The findings include a reference to a 2016 survey by the Department of Transportation in which over 60% of truckers reported spending an hour or more per day looking for parking.

The current language of the bill would seem to exempt any buildings on a piece of property that included a qualified truck parking lot from real and personal property taxes, not just the part of it with the actual lot. It doesn’t say anything about how affordable the charging or hydrogen fueling needs to be, about what capacity for charging or refueling some or all of the trucks is required, or that the spaces need to be in a location where they are used by truckers. The intent to continue the incentives isn’t tied to any evidence that 1,000 additional parking spaces would not have been developed in any case.

The exemptions are subject to the standard review by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee. For that, a new tax preference performance statement is supposed to “specify clear, relevant, and ascertainable metrics and data requirements that allow the committee and the Legislature to measure [its] effectiveness in achieving the designated purpose of the exemption.” In relation to this review requirement the bill specifies the tax preference as “intended to provide incentives to increase safe overnight truck parking capacity.”

Summary –
The bill would exempt all real and personal property “upon which there are at least 10 safe, overnight commercial truck parking spaces constructed” from taxes on their value starting with the taxes due in 2023, and continuing until a year after the Secretary of the Department of Transportation certified to the Department of Revenue that the state has sufficient safe, overnight commercial truck parking for its freight delivery needs of the state or January 1, 2033, whichever is sooner. It would exempt the sales of materials and labor used to construct a parking lot with at least ten qualified commercial or port district truck parking spaces from sales and use taxes, if they were accessible and suitable for overnight use, and allowed for charging electric batteries or fuel cells. It adds all leasehold interests in real property owned by a port and used by a tenant to provide qualified port district truck parking spaces to the current list of interests exempt from the leasehold excise tax.

The bill declares the Legislature’s intent to extend the incentive if the number of truck parking spaces suitable for overnight use grows by at least 1,000 spaces while it’s in place, and at least half of the spaces developed have hydrogen fueling access or electric charging access.

Details –
The exemptions would apply to spaces on which substantial construction work began while they were in place; spaces would have to be at least 11′ by 54′; port district spaces would only have to be accessible and available to any commercial truck authorized to be on port property.