It’s budget season for local governments in Washington! Climate funding for local governments is crucial to lowering energy costs and protecting us from extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and more.

King County has been a leader in this space for years, emphasizing environmental justice through policies and programs that not only protecting BIPOC, low-income, and other underserved communities from climate change, but also on distributing benefits of the rising clean energy economy to those communities

Now, we need to make sure that King County continues to fund these priorities in 2027. King County Executive Girmay Zahilay is proposing a budget that not only retains staffing and funding for existing climate work, but also makes new investments, including:

• Providing heat pumps and air filtration to airport-adjacent communities
• Increasing workforce development opportunities for green jobs
• Directly funding community-led climate resilience projects
• Developing community-trusted sites with cooling and battery storage
• Adding a new public fast charger for electric vehicles in airport-adjacent communities and exploring policies to expand public charging in King County

It’s crucial the councilmembers do not cut any of the staff that work on these programs. The institutional knowledge and community trust that they bring is crucial to King County meeting its climate targets and protecting its residents and workers.

Send an email to your councilmember calling for adequate funding and staffing for King County’s highly-successful climate programs. Please call on King County Council to implement the Executive’s proposed climate investments.