Under an injunction issued by the U.S. District Court in 2013, the state of Washington must fix fish passage barriers in Western Washington by 2030. The state has begun this work, but there is a lot left to do.

In the 2019–21 transportation budget enacted this year, the Legislature appropriated $100 million to replace culverts (another $363.4 million is planned from 2021–23 through 2029–31). After signing the transportation budget, Gov. Inslee said, “I am directing my Department of Transportation to immediately ramp up its culvert repair program and I am using budget flexibility provided by the legislature to increase culvert repair spending to $275 million in the next biennium.”

That budget flexibility is found in Section 601 of the transportation budget. It provides that WSDOT “is expected to use the flexibility provided in this section to assist in the delivery and completion of all transportation partnership account and connecting Washington account projects.” As Jerry Cornfield reported at the time, “Inslee’s top advisers Tuesday could not cite another example of a governor . . . asserting executive authority to redirect such a large sum of transportation dollars absent involvement of lawmakers.”

The Office of Financial Management (OFM) and WSDOT discussed the spending transfers and current status of culvert repair at a meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation yesterday. The table below is from OFM’s presentation. Of the total $100 million appropriated for culverts in 2019–21, $36.5 million is funded through Connecting Washington. Connecting Washington is planned to fund another $199.5 million from 2021–23 through 2029–31. The table shows how the transfer would change the amount spent on culverts in 2019–21 compared to the out years, without changing the total spent. The $175 million for 2019–21 will come from projects that were under expended in 2017–19, but the specific projects have not yet been determined.

WSDOT has about 2,000 fish barriers across the state, and about 992 are subject to the injunction. Of those 992, about 415 must be fixed by 2030. By the end of this summer, 72 will have been addressed. According to WSDOT, current funding is expected to total $739 million through 2029–31, but they estimate that they will need a total of $3.796 billion to comply with the injunction. (See the table from their presentation below.) As The News Tribune reports, this $3.796 billion estimate is up from a 2007 estimate of $1.88 billion.