Coffee with State Representative Lauren Davis
Davis discusses her bills that passed with broad bipartisan support this year, focused on supporting domestic violence survivors and people with behavioral health challenges.
State Representative Lauren Davis recently sat down to talk about the 2025 legislative session over a cup of coffee at the Drumlin espresso bar in Ridgecrest.
Davis represents the 32nd district, which encompasses parts of Seattle, Shoreline, Edmonds, Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, and Woodway, and has been reelected four times since 2018.
Davis was the primary sponsor of two bills that passed with broad bipartisan support this session. The Domestic Violence Co-Responder bill (HB 1498) pairs law enforcement with non-police advocates and clinicians to support survivors of domestic violence, funded by an additional $100 fee on marriage licenses. The Certified Peer Support Specialists bill (SHB 1427) aims to improve access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment by certifying people in recovery to serve as peer support specialists.
Here is a shortened version of the complete interview transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Oliver J. Moffat: What was the biggest accomplishment for you in the 2025 session?
Representative Lauren Davis: Yeah. A lot fewer accomplishments than previous sessions, I would say, because we had no money. And at the end of the day, I'm a human services legislator primarily, and the things that I work on cost money…
And because of that policy landscape related to funding, if you wanted to start a new program or launch anything, you were going to have to find your own money. So I was able to do that successfully in a shockingly bipartisan manner. I had a piece of legislation that was House Bill 1498.
It's a really effective model. It's basically conceptually very similar to mental health corresponders. Police call them to a mental health call, and they send a mental health professional. So, it's basically an identical concept except when police secure a domestic violence scene, they summon a domestic violence victim advocate 24/7.
I sit on the House Community Safety Committee. I do a lot of ride-alongs… and the SPD officer I was riding with last week had only… become a cop in middle age. And I was like, “Given that, what surprised you about law enforcement?” First thing he said, “Domestic violence is an epidemic. I had no idea.”
And yet what happens is there's this pamphlet. Each police department has this pamphlet that they hand out to victims. And the reality is, whether there's an arrest or not an arrest, it's a family in crisis. And the uptake on victim engagement with services out of those pamphlets is incredibly low. But the uptake on victim engagement when you actually send a human being is really high…
And so really trying to make sure that people get help, but also make sure that victims have actual choice.
OJM: There is some funding attached to the bill but probably not going to be enough to fund 24-hours, 7 days a week, a co-responder in every single PD. What's the expectation there? That local PDs will roll this into their existing co-responder models?
Rep Davis: I wrote in the bill that it has to be a matching program because I wanted the locals to have some sort of skin in the game…
Part of the job right now is to actually talk to local governments who are actually pretty cash poor and financially constrained…
Here in Shoreline, we have the RCR program. It's interesting because it's an inter-local agreement, and they are city of Kirkland employees. But should they want, there's already an existing infrastructure… I can see a scenario in which, if the cities were interested, they could apply jointly.
I think regional approaches are going to be favored. It doesn't make sense to have a 24/7 victim advocate for the city of Shoreline only, for example. There's a lot of DV, but the call volume doesn't justify it.
The amount of money is dependent on how many people are married in the state. But it's been roughly between 40,000 and 42,000 a year. So between $4 and $4.2 million a year is what it would generate, which is not nothing, but it's by no means adequate to sort of peanut butter this around the whole state…
The legislature just newly authorized this one-tenth of 1% councilmatic sales tax for cities or counties. King County is going to pass it. While the hiring of law enforcement officers is centered in that, co-response is specifically enumerated as an allowable cost…
OJM: I’m also curious about the Peer Support Specialists bill (SHB 1427). Do you have some examples of what a peer support specialist does?
Rep Davis: Basically, the requirement to work in a peer role is that you identify as a person in recovery from a mental health or substance use condition or challenge and you've been in sustained remission for a year or more.
These are folks who have a super colorful past; they’ve experienced homelessness, a lot of criminal legal entanglement, perhaps survivor of DV, perhaps survivor of childhood sexual abuse…
They are really extraordinarily gifted at human connection. That is their secret sauce. And I always say that peers deal in the currency of hope and motivation… They're able to engage individuals in treatment who would, absent a peer, forever exist outside of healthcare…
Because it's who's the messenger. It’s not a law enforcement officer. It's not a social worker. It's a person who came out of those same encampments who's actually coming to greet them and bring them a snack and give them a cup of water and have a conversation…
The data tells us that when a person has a peer, they're much more likely to stay engaged in treatment. Their length of engagement in treatment. They're much more likely to engage in treatment at all…
Generally, people that are in the throws of behavioral health crisis have super low self-esteem. Like they don't believe they're capable of just about anything. And the peers are able to bring that back and be like, "Okay, let's do this and then let's set this bigger goal and now let's talk about what are you gonna do for work? Okay, well let me connect you here, here, and here."
OJM: But if I remember correctly, there's not any funding attached with this particular bill.
Rep Davis: There was a modicum of funding. There was a little less than a million dollars. I want to say it was like $850,000 or something like that, but the bill is actually fairly wonky…
Basically, a huge amount of peer services that governments in Washington are currently purchasing, either the state is purchasing or the counties or the cities are purchasing, they're not billing health insurance at all.
It's existing totally outside of the healthcare infrastructure. And that is fine in an era where you have money to go around. Because it's a pain in the neck to bill insurance…
But now we're in this time of budgeting austerity, and we don't have money anymore, and neither do the local governments. And so we're sort of leaving money on the table because everything that they're doing, case management and peer services, are billable to health insurance. We're just not billing them…
What the bill directs is basically that the healthcare authority has to go find some consultant to put together options for the state, which could include things like a universal billing entity that all these different orgs kind of plug into…
The other thing that the bill does is… most of those services are funded federally… and those have decreased substantially. Yet our sexual assault agencies, [domestic violence] agencies, are relying on that funding federally. But that funding is drying up federally…
So my thought was if you… got people the appropriate credential, you could actually bill insurance. And if you bill insurance, that would basically solve this federal funding volatility problem. And it would also solve the fact that we don't have [state funding] anymore to top up for the federal government's lack of funding.
And so the bill creates this new endorsement basically on top of an existing peer credential. One for human trafficking, one for sexual assault, and one for domestic violence… They currently exist completely outside of healthcare.
But they're basically doing peer work. They just don't think of it that way and they don't call it that… If you got these people credentialed as peers that opens up billing possibilities for that agency. And that could create a huge sustainability success for agencies.