There were nearly 1,000 lobbyists in Washington state last year. That’s more than six for every lawmaker.

During the 2025 legislative session, which wraps up Sunday, lobbyists crowded outside the wings of the state House and Senate in Olympia. They chilled under blossoming cherry trees by the Territorial Sundial. They waited outside committee rooms just to catch a moment with a lawmaker.

“I try not to chase them down,” Chester Baldwin said on a recent day in Olympia, as he waited outside a state Senate Ways and Means hearing, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, a suit and a pink and blue Jerry Garcia tie.

“Sometimes their office will be like, ‘If you’re in this hallway at this time, you can catch them and walk to their next hearing,” Baldwin said. ”Because sometimes, all you need is 60 seconds.”

Baldwin’s clients include family wineries and landlords, along with plumbing, heating, and cooling contractors. He’s been lobbying for more than a decade. In the beginning Baldwin just did it on the side, like many registered lobbyists. When the pandemic hit, his main business in criminal defense and eviction law dried up, with trials delayed and evictions on hold.

“The lobbying business went through the roof, because we were now in the pandemic actively, and no one knew what was going on. No one knew what was an essential service,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin is far from alone. Congressional deadlock in the last decade has meant lobbies and advocacy groups can’t get much done on the federal level. So they’ve turned to state legislatures.

In the last decade, money spent lobbying in Washington rose more steadily and dramatically than other U.S. states that track lobbying money — from around $41 million in 2014 to more than $90 million last year. Colorado is the only other state that tracks lobbying spending where it steadily grew to more than double in the same time period.

“There’s a rate of increase across all states, but not to that same extent where you’re seeing a doubling of the spending over a decade,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights for Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks spending on lobbyists. “There’s more money coming in. There’s more opportunity for lobbyists to get in there and make money.”

‘Inherently evil’ or critically important?

People like Baldwin are painfully aware of the public’s perception of their job. In January, a Gallup survey found 68% of Americans have a low or very low view of lobbyists. They had a lower net favorability rating than members of Congress or even TV reporters. (Newspaper reporters scored higher but still had more unfavorable opinions than favorable. Radio reporters were conspicuously not in the survey.)

Lawmakers who leave to go into lobbying draw bipartisan ire. As Baldwin and I stood talking in the hall, former state Sen. Kevin Van De Wege walked by. He retired from the Senate last year and is making more than four times his Senate salary per month, according to Public Disclosure Commission filings. Van De Wege lobbies for the state association of nurse anesthetists, the state farm bureau, and the Coalition for Community Solar Access.

But that’s somewhat rare. It’s far more common for state employees to go into lobbying. Four years ago, one analysis found one in five lobbyists in Olympia used to work in state government.

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In fact, lobbying is as much a part of state commerce as state government. Even if a few pennies of your rent don’t end up in the pocket of a lobbyist like Chester Baldwin, your delivery fees might. Amazon and DoorDash are huge spenders in Washington state.

Some of your taxes probably even pay a lobbyist. Eighty-five cities and all 39 counties in Washington hire lobbyists to push for things like raising your property taxes to fund programs and services.

“I was a criminal defense attorney before I was a lobbyist,” Baldwin said, putting his hand down low near the floor. “If you’re talking about rungs of the ladder, they’re right here. Like, the only thing below criminal defense attorney might be lobbyist.”

But Baldwin loves lobbying. He believes his clients deserve a say in legislation affecting them, and he says the amount of legislation he’s written in the last decade is “not insignificant.” He also believes lobbyists are actually a key part of how information moves around Olympia.

Some experts might even agree with him.

“I don’t think lobbyists are inherently always evil,” said Dan Butler, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “Among other things, they provide information. We expect our legislators to be voting on all sorts of topics about which they know very little.”

Thousands of bills are introduced every year dealing with everything from fisheries, to highways, to dental plans. Lobbyists represent trade associations with expertise in those areas.

Of course, they also represent people with incentives to stop bills. While Butler has found no evidence that lobbying changes lawmakers’ votes, a 2021 study he co-authored did find that lobbyists influence what comes up in committees and on the floor.

“Lobbying is not changing how people vote on a given issue, but it’s changing whether it gets a vote, and that’s an important power in American politics,” Butler said.

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How to work a bill

For years, Chester Baldwin has been working to kill legislation on rent caps for landlords, limiting how much they could raise the rent each year. He and other lobbyists have succeeded each of the past three years, but each time, rent caps have crept closer to passage.

This year, it’s closer than ever, and the Senate Ways and Means hearing was Baldwin’s last chance to be heard by lawmakers. Supporters of the rent cap legislation filed in wearing orange; opponents wore red.

One of the red shirts was Matt Costanti, a former plumber who rents out four units in the state and is a member of the Rental Housing Association.

“You should want people like me that can donate to local charities and things,” Costanti said. “Instead of, you know, large out-of-state corporations that can bear massive amounts of regulation and cost. And what’s happening is, people like me are being eliminated. They pass this, I will most likely convert my units to condos and exit the business, which is sad.”

Many small-time housing providers are telling Baldwin’s clients the same thing.

But when Baldwin put that sentiment to Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, a Tacoma Democrat who stepped into the hallway to talk, she saw it differently.

“New home-ownership opportunities, is what you’re telling me,” Trudeau said.

Baldwin, Trudeau, and Sean Flynn, the president of the Rental Housing Association, went back and forth in the hallway while red and orange shirts filtered by.

“There is this issue of this cap that is somewhere that we just very much disagree on what the policy — " Baldwin said.

“I think my mom deserves to know what she’s going to pay for rent every year so that she can budget appropriately,” Trudeau said. “And many people on fixed income, particularly, like my mom, deserve that same stability.”

The discussion around this bill has not just been about the bill itself. A lot of it has been about lobbying.

“There hasn’t been any conversations, willing conversations, or negotiations from the landlord side — not one,” Trudeau said. “And I haven’t seen one iota of bend or give from the landlords ever.”

“There’s lots of things to negotiate,” Flynn said. “If you want to stakeholder this, let’s do it. Let’s post the bill. Let’s kill the bill this year, and we’ll enter a robust stakeholder process.”

“This is the third year that this bill has been introduced,” Trudeau said. “There’s been a lot of opportunity. But if you take a look at even the flavor in the hearing room, everyone comes in with red shirts and says ‘no’ and sits down at the front, and you tell me how that’s an open-for-negotiation conversation.”

“Our strong opposition to this bill is about the cap in the bill,” Baldwin said. “It’s not about the rest of the bill. We could work on the rest of the policy.”

“The cap is the stability,” Trudeau said.

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Other opponents of the bill have also lobbed lobbying-related accusations at the proponents. Earlier this month, a conservative activist filed a complaint against the sponsor, Democratic Sen. Emily Alvarado, because she works for a nonprofit that lobbies on housing issues.

The activist said Alvarado’s employer, Enterprise Community Partners, is lobbying for the rent limit bill she sponsored. A spokesperson for Enterprise said that’s not true. A Washington lobbyist paid by Enterprise did not list the rent bill among legislation he was working on in public disclosure filings.

The other side

Lobbying for the rent-cap legislation is a heavy hitter in Olympia: Nick Federici. He’s been lobbying in Washington state since 1994.

“I don’t think anybody sets out to be a lobbyist. If they do, there’s something wrong with them, probably,” Federici said between calls from lawmakers last week.

His parents were in public service, and his father was a city councilman, port commissioner and state legislator in Oregon. Federici started working as a low-level legislative analyst in the ’90s in Olympia.

“I liked doing the analysis and making a recommendation, but I didn’t like stopping there, right?” Federici said. “I just wanted to be able to push a little harder than making recommendations and then having to take a knee.”

Federici has been called a “white hat” lobbyist because his book includes human services nonprofits, service employee unions and United Way of King County. But he also spent three years working for British Petroleum on the Climate Commitment Act.

“Being an oil lobbyist for a minute was not on my bingo card of professional aspirations,” Federici said. He helped get the Climate Commitment Act passed with some carve-outs for BP.

That’s a key part of lobbying, Federici said. Not just trying to stop bills, but working out a compromise.

That’s what happened to rent caps last week, when the bill Baldwin was working came up in the Senate. Democrats raised the cap from 7% to 10% plus inflation — a big loss for Federici and the coalition supporting rent limits, but a win claimed by lobbyists for developers and the local chapter of the National Apartment Association.

RELATED: Rent caps close to becoming law in Washington state, despite divisions among Democrats

Those lobbies pushed House Democrats to concur with the Senate’s changes, but this week, in a very narrow vote, the House didn’t.

Lawmakers hashed out a compromise as the final days of the session, which is supposed to end Sunday, ticked away. They will reportedly vote on it as soon as Friday evening.

Lobbyists like Baldwin and Federici are working down to the wire.

Scott Greenstone is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/04/27/washington-state-legislature-lobbyists/