Legislative week in review; Session wraps up at midnight on Sunday

— from Governor Jay Inslee —

The legislative session (currently on its 103rd day) is scheduled to end on Sunday. Legislators have reached a tentative budget agreement and they are scheduled to vote on it this weekend. Legislators have until midnight on Sunday (the 105th day) to pass the budget and any other remaining bills. 

More than 300 bills are expected to make their way to the governor for action this session. Among the bills signed by the governor this week is one to eliminate the backlog of more than 10,000 untested rape kits in Washington. If funded by the budget, additional crime lab personnel will be hired to process the existing kits, and then – starting in 2022 – the Washington State Patrol will have a 45-day window to test a rape kit. Among a number of provisions, the bill establishes a moratorium on destroying untested rape kits, creates a Survivor Bill of Rights and requires law enforcement to receive training on best practices on notifying victims of the results of the forensic analysis and other significant events in the investigation.

Another bill the governor signed this week will help find the tragic and untold numbers of missing women of Native American heritage. National news reports have highlighted that Native American women are “killed or trafficked at rates far higher than the rest of the U.S. population,” and the cases are often ignored or unsolved.  The bipartisan bill signed by Inslee establishes two liaison positions in the Washington State Patrol to build relationships between government and native communities. It requires WSP to develop a best practices protocol for law enforcement response to missing persons reports for indigenous women and other indigenous people.

Finally, the governor signed a bill that makes a number of changes to the statutes on wrongful death and survival actions. In 2015, five young people were killed in a “Ride the Ducks” tourist vehicle crash. But because they were international students, their parents were unable to pursue certain legal recourse for their childrens’ wrongful deaths. This bill removes the requirement that a parent must be a U.S. resident or financially dependent on their child to bring wrongful death claims.

For this week’s throwback, take a peek at how the road that leads to the Capitol looked 90 years ago versus earlier this week when food trucks showed up.