During a busy session for public safety funding ideas – One comes out on top

The Legislature came out of the gates fast in 2025 with a slew of bills aimed at both public safety funding and policy issues, but only a handful ultimately passed.

Public safety funding

At one point during the legislative session, AWC was tracking around seven different public safety funding ideas. A group of AWC-supported bills had hearings but failed to advance, including our favored approach in HB 1428 to increase the direct distributions in the Municipal Criminal Justice Assistance Account by $25 million per biennium. Other funding bills allowed for sales tax, councilmanic authority, grants, or a mixture of them all.

Successful among those included new Governor Bob Ferguson’s support for increased funding for law enforcement hiring and recruitment in a major success for cites via HB 2015. This legislation creates a three-year, $100 million grant program for cities and counties to hire new public safety officers, and empowers local jurisdictions to enact a new 0.1% sales tax to fund broadly defined criminal justice purposes. Cities and counties that have added or are adding co-responder services will get priority for the grant funding. This AWC priority legislation has the capacity to improve public safety throughout Washington, especially if the Legislature moves in the future to make the grant program permanently available statewide.

As HB 2015 moved through the Legislature, the amendment process added to it some elements of HB 1399, a dead bill that had proposed to restrict how law enforcement volunteers could be used. AWC had expressed concerns that the early versions of HB 1399 were overly restrictive and ultimately that bill died. The elements from the bill that made it into HB 2015 require law enforcement agencies to establish manageable guidelines for what volunteers can do, and restricts police volunteers to unarmed, non-criminal enforcement duties.

Co-response programs were also strengthened in HB 1811, which secures the status of co-response team members as first responders for legal and workers’ compensation considerations. This legislation also directs the University of Washington School of Social Work to develop a formal crisis responder training program.

Despite the limitations of budget capacity in the 2025 session, the Legislature responded in other meaningful ways to public safety needs.

Criminal justice

The Legislature budgeted $2.7 million for public defense grants to cities, accompanied by a larger addition to county funding, which together will partly address an ongoing crisis in indigency defense resources in courthouses statewide. This is a significant increase given how little funding has traditionally been provided to cities, but still well short of addressing the costs.

The Office of Public Defense has proposed to use the increased resources available during the next funding cycle to shift its grants to cities away from a calendar-year schedule to a cycle that matches the state’s fiscal year. Meanwhile, we still await a pending potential decision from the state Supreme Court regarding whether or not to revise statewide caseload standards.

State law governing the requirements for court interpreters was streamlined in HB 1174, which updated reimbursement procedures for the state Administrative Office of the Courts and removed sections of law that courts have invalidated.

There was renewed interest this session in the state’s efforts to address ongoing impacts of the Trueblood decision, notably via HB 1218 that ultimately failed to pass. The bill aimed to create varying mechanisms to try and reduce the amount of statewide competency evaluations for individuals to stand trial.

Traffic safety

HB 1596 creates a new way to tamp down the dangers posed by people who repeatedly flaunt posted speed limits. The legislation, inspired by multiple traffic deaths in a single accident caused by a person with a history of speeding citations, requires a speed-limiting device to be installed in the vehicles of recidivist speeding drivers.

In an effort to impact driving safety outcomes, a host of other bills this session aimed at various policy changes that ultimately failed to pass. Most of those bills focused on a mixture of steeper criminal penalties, a lowered BAC while driving limit, civil penalties, and the use of various technologies.