Infrastructure planning underlies a fundamental premise of the Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA) — that growth should occur where adequate facilities and infrastructure exist or are planned to exist. However, since the passage of the GMA, the public sector’s ability to build infrastructure has diminished, due to funding constraints, rising material and land costs, voter initiatives, and other regulatory factors. The inability to make needed infrastructure available, in the face of strong forecast growth in population and jobs, has pushed many jurisdictions’ infrastructure facilities to their limits.

VISION 2040 contains policies and implementation actions that speak to researching financing tools for facilities and services – including natural resource planning and open space – to help local governments implement the regional vision and local plans. To implement these policies and actions, PSRC’s Growth Management Policy Board developed a draft scope of work for a project to investigate infrastructure funding sources. Recognizing the significant body of existing and on-going work on this topic by multiple state-level and statewide stakeholders, the project was defined as researching past efforts, monitoring and participating in ongoing efforts, and seeking to make this body of work relevant for the local government members of the PSRC.