By: Sue Lani Madsen | Special to unDivided
There’s essential information, nice-to-have information, and why-are-you-telling-me-this information. HB 1015 is about requiring more of the latter. It would allow counties and cities to place a new requirement on residential sellers – requiring a home energy score before publicly listing a house for sale.
But it’s information buyers routinely ignore, according to folks in Oregon.
Washington state doesn’t have to be the crash test dummy for HB 1015. Portland first adopted residential energy labeling in 2017, joined later by the Oregon cities of Hillsboro, Milwaukie and Bend, effective July 1, 2023.
It wasn’t hard to check out how it’s working in Oregon, and researching those outcomes should be an essential part of any bill before it comes to committee. Randomly calling a central Oregon brokerage led to a productive conversation with Susanna Abrahamson, licensed Realtor and former chair of the Realtor’s government affairs committee at the time the requirement was adopted. A Home Energy Score (HES) as defined by the federal Department of Energy is mandated within the city limits of Bend for anyone selling their home with a realtor.
When Abrahamson tells sellers about the requirement, the reaction is . . . Why? Another expense? Do we have to? And what if we don’t?
On the buyer side, “people generally don’t even look at it. It’s mostly irrelevant,” said Abrahamson. “The vast majority of people do not care . . . I haven’t had a single client do something differently” in their decision making based on the Home Energy Score.
There are sincere, good intentions behind HB 1015 but it suffers from the Olympia “if it sounds good, it must be good” rule. Everywhere else, outcomes matter.
Home energy labeling was described at the January 17 Environment and Energy Committee hearing as a simple rating system, like a miles-per-gallon sticker on a new car. Home buyers would be able to compare mileage between houses, like one SUV to another. Except houses, especially houses up for resale, don’t have the consistency of a single make and model right off an assembly line.
Testimony and questions at the hearing highlighted the lack of inspectors as a barrier to a successful outcome for HB 1015. According to the Oregon experience, it appears the consistency of the inspections is also an issue.
Abrahamson described different certified inspectors rating a series of newly constructed homes with very different home energy score numbers. Or two inspectors reviewing the same house and coming up with different numbers.
Inconsistency has led to urban legends, like the one about sellers stacking solar panels in the garage so the energy score would go up. There were indeed solar panels on the property even if they weren’t producing power, following the letter if not the spirit of the program, so an inspector checked it off. Parsing words is what people do when forced to jump through hoops perceived to add no value to their lives.
Another concern raised at the committee hearing was the extra time to schedule an energy audit, and the subsequent delay in selling. Would waiting for an HES rating be a bottleneck to getting a home on the market quickly? Would it be a particular barrier for rural properties?
Michigan has a requirement similar to HB 1015, and a little poking around found a two month wait to get on the calendar of Ecotelligent Homes of Farmington Hills (near Detroit) for an inspection. Their travel policy indicates they like to stay within a 45-minute drive of their office, so rural Michigan is out of luck.
Apparently yes, getting an HES could be a bottleneck.
It's a conclusion based on the appointment calendar of a single company, but a conclusion no more speculative than assuming the demand for certified energy assessors will draw enough people to the currently empty field to eliminate backlogs. Ecotelligent Homes is plenty busy in Michigan. It’s reasonable to assume the future certified inspectors of Washington would be equally busy and just as prone to stay close to home base.
The language behind HB 1015 appears to be drawn from the Better Buildings program of the Department of Energy, available for use by any jurisdiction. It is unclear what purpose HB 1015 serves if counties and cities can already do it on their own. Thurston County is about to adopt a model ordinance for home energy labeling that has been in the works for three years. Why not wait and see what the outcomes are in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater?
Touted as a market driven way to improve energy efficiency in existing homes, is HB 1015 really going to be useful for buyers in making a decision? For reducing energy consumption?
I asked my cousins David and Alena T. who sold a house in Portland within the last two years how the requirement affected their sale. David looked it up. “Our agent just marked the HES as a 1 on the listing, said people didn’t pay any attention to it and not worth putting any money towards it. Doesn’t matter for a good house in a good location.”
There you have it on HB 1015. Nobody cares. Houses sell. The market has spoken.
Of course, that won’t stop lawmakers in Olympia from proceeding.
HB 1015 was scheduled for Executive Session in the Environment and Energy Committee on January 24. Prime sponsor Rep. Davina Duerr (D-Bothell) submitted a proposed substitute expanding the program, if adopted by a county or city, to “include duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, cottage housing, townhouses, and attached accessory dwelling units in addition to single family residences” and to allow the adopting county to add additional categories of ratings.
PSHB was moved out of Committee on a party line vote, all Democrats in favor, all Republicans opposed. If you’re thinking of selling property in a county likely to jump on this bandwagon, keep an eye on this bill.
About the author:
Sue Lani Madsen calls herself an accidental journalist after 30 years as an architect. She spent nine years as a weekly columnist for the Spokesman-Review, writing about public policy and other topics reflecting her experience in agriculture as a rancher, rural healthcare and urban disaster response as an EMT, and wildland fire and forest policy as a firefighter. She publishes on Substack and The Center Square. She will also be contributing her expertise to unDivided's coverage of the 2025 Legislative Session. Sue Lani lives on a ranch west of Spokane with husband Craig, 200 plus goats and three dogs.
As President Trump moves to dismantle DEI and radical gender ideology, Washington state digs its heels in. Separating immigrant families is bad, but separating YOUR family is good. Shady business around rent control proposal. Left demands complete vaccine obedience.
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8645070-washington-state-is-the-resistance-and-not-in-a-good-way-1-29-25
As President Donald Trump carries out deportations, Governor Bob Ferguson is doing exactly what we expected he would do. A trio of bills that show the authoritarian bend of Democrats in Olympia. Activist judge argues for a bill that would give her more discretion and even a Democrat calls her out. Media falls in line on egg price talking point.
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8643913-washington-vs-washington-immigration-battle-commences-1-27-25
These remarks were delivered to the Snohomish County Lincoln Day Dinner on May 17, 2024.
The following remarks were delivered to the Whatcom County Lincoln Day Dinner on March 23, 2024, in Ferndale, Washington.
I struggled with what to talk to you about tonight.
Well, that’s not true. I didn't struggle with what to talk to you about – I struggled with whether I was brave enough to say what I wanted to say.
When I'm invited to speak to groups, I don't want to offend anyone or be too controversial. So, I reached out to a few of your fellow party members to ask whether any topics were off limits or wouldn't go over well with the crowd.
I got some good advice.
Then I decided to ignore that good advice entirely.
Too much is at stake to be polite.
As we sit here tonight, we are in the final battle of a war.
A war that has pit sanity against insanity.
Pragmatism against idealism.
A war that has sacrificed the public good, in favor of a twisted idea of progress.
It's a war that began long before I moved here 15 years ago. It started silently and it was mostly waged in the shadows.
Most of us didn't even realize that a war was being fought. We were too caught up in our own lives and our own problems. ...
As President Trump moves to dismantle DEI and radical gender ideology, Washington state digs its heels in. Separating immigrant families is bad, but separating YOUR family is good. Shady business around rent control proposal. Left demands complete vaccine obedience.
In the fight for parental rights in schools, we’ve won the battle – but the war continues. Commonsense school board members resign in Burien. Dishonest Democratic senator wants to help prop up legacy newsrooms. Even the state’s most progressive county realizes that juvenile gun crimes are out of control. The great egg debate.
A Washington parent says her son’s high school teacher gave his class bizarre homework: email lawmakers to oppose an election integrity bill. Meanwhile, test scores are in the toilet. Democrats in Olympia move ahead with plan to erode parental rights and a bill making homelessness a protected class. In Florida, Republicans feud over immigration law.
When I first started dating my husband in 2018, I avoided asking who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. Part of me already knew the answer, but I wanted to bury the uncomfortable truth: he’d voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I’d asked him the question then, I’m not sure we’d be where we are today: happily married and head-over-heels in love.
When we met in the fall of 2018, I was a political reporter at the local FOX-TV affiliate in Seattle and President Trump was less than two years into his first term. While I’ve always been right of Seattle’s hard-left politics – it was difficult to break free from the groupthink of a newsroom. Especially a newsroom in one of the bluest cities in America.
Donald Trump had declared the “fake news” media the enemy of the American people and, in turn, we waged war against him, too.
To be clear, not all our coverage was unfair. It’s the media’s job to hold politicians accountable and there’s no doubt, when it came to Trump, the Fourth Estate took that job seriously. The problem, as I’ve come to realize, was they took it less seriously when it came to Democrats. They still do.
During my years at FOX 13 News, I like to think I did my best to hold Washington state progressives accountable for their failures on homelessness, crime, and the anti-business policies that were driving companies like Amazon to move jobs elsewhere. But, in truth, I spent far too much time as a local news reporter covering the White House. I even convinced my bosses to send me to the border in 2019 to cover the so-called family separation crisis – an unusual expense for a local newsroom to agree to. It’s worth noting that local FOX affiliates are different from the network and don’t necessarily share the same conservative bias. Ours certainly did not.
My family and friends knew I was vehemently anti-Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and often chided my older brother for flying a Trump flag outside his home in Minnesota. By 2019, I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend – but still avoided talking to him about Trump and left the room when he’d turn on his favorite network news show.
In hindsight, I had what the right calls Trump Derangement Syndrome. And my diagnosis had the potential to be terminal.
But things started to turn at a most unexpected time.
The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had a different effect on me than you might expect. Rather than deepen my disdain for Donald Trump, it opened my eyes to disturbing depths of hypocrisy that I cannot unsee.
I’d just spent six months covering acts of leftwing political violence in Seattle that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
I watched as cop cars were torched in the streets downtown. My security guard disarmed rioters of stolen police rifles. Stores were looted to the studs – bare manikins left strewn in the streets. Officers were assaulted and hit with improvised explosive devices. My crew was mobbed in what later became known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) – six square blocks surrounding a police precinct that were taken over by armed anti-police extremists. A few days into the occupation, rioters tried to light the precinct on fire after putting quick-drying cement on a door to lock officers in.
Those are just a few examples of what unfolded in Seattle during the racial justice movement of 2020. Our mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, famously referred to it as a “Summer of Love.” The acts of that summer were ignored and even supported by many in our city’s Democratic leadership. Then-Councilwoman Tammy Morales scolded anyone who questioned the behavior of criminal demonstrators.
“What I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn’t solve anything,” she said during the unrest.
Our state’s chief law enforcer at the time, Attorney General Bob Fergson, stayed mostly silent about the destruction happening on our streets. He had by then made a national name for himself by suing the Trump administration dozens of times and had his eye on the governor’s office (which he went on to win in 2024). There was no way he’d risk angering his base by condemning leftwing extremism. Instead, he issued a short statement focused on criminal justice reform.
The media downplayed the violence, too. Even my own station took great pains to excuse or ignore criminal acts and play up non-criminal elements of the protests.
No such pains were taken with J6ers.
That hypocrisy was the beginning of my yearslong red pilling.
In 2021, frustrated by new management and our coverage of both the riots and the pandemic, I quit my job in news to launch an independent show.
The biggest supporter of me walking away from my $185,000/year dream job?
My sweet, Trump-voting boyfriend.
I married him in the fall of 2023, five years after I almost let his support for Donald Trump steal the joy we now share. There’s little doubt that had I asked him in the early days of our relationship who he’d voted for in the 2016 election, I would have ended things.
Typing that now makes my heart hurt.
This past November, I voted for Donald. J Trump for the first time. And yes, my husband did too.
Today, more than any other emotion, I am full of hope and optimism for our country – finally free from the echo chamber that once soured me on Trump and his agenda. But I am also battling a tinge of guilt. Guilt for the viewers I let down in those early days of the Trump administration. Guilt over the wonderful life I almost cost myself.
For that, I offer a sincere apology to our 47th President (and my husband, for that matter). And I offer this advice to anyone upset by a second term of Donald J. Trump: Never let politics stand in the way of your happiness. And never be too stubborn to change your mind.
