Interview with Representative Lauren Davis Full Transcript

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.

This is a transcript of an interview with State Representative Lauren Davis on August 5th, 2025 to talk about the 2025 legislative session. This transcript has been 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 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 sort of 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 actually in a shockingly bipartisan manner. I had a piece of legislation that was House Bill 1498 [the Domestic Violence Co-Responders bill].

It's a really effective model. It's basically conceptually very familiar with mental health corresponders. Police call them to a mental health call, 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.

What happens currently is police arrive on the scene and they hand a victim a 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.

You hear it over and over again in court where a victim goes into court and asks for a judge to rescind a no-contact order that arose out of a criminal case. And the primary reason they ask for that is because he's paying the rent and they can't afford to exist without their partner.

A lot of these victims who are, not all, but overwhelmingly female, don’t have actual choice or agency in the matter at all. And they can't afford a lawyer for a divorce. Or he’s a threat, or he's going to take the kids in a custody dispute, etc., etc.

But when you provide resources to a victim, their agency returns. They can actually figure out, “okay, I could actually move here because there's this relocation assistance”.

I do a lot of work on the prevention of intimate partner homicide, DV homicide. It's an incredibly morbid topic, but it's also really a quiet epidemic in this state. We've got somewhere between 50 and 70 intimate partner homicides in the state every year and they're totally preventable. Intimate partner homicide is actually the most preventable form of homicide. A lot of homicides are crimes of passion, or in the moment.

But intimate partner homicide is actually very predictable. The research has documented this eight-stage pattern that is followed prior to it. So if you can intervene early and help a victim recognize the level of danger they're in, and help provide resources (also for the perpetrator of domestic violence) to address underlying mental health, addiction, make sure a firearm is secured, what have you. If you intervene in that crucial window, you can close a lethality window where a homicide could potentially occur. Particularly after an arrest. Because a person is very angry and there's just been this disruption and then they're getting out of jail. And the victim typically has this piece of paper which is not particularly effective at preventing contact.

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. But I specifically did not enumerate in the text of the bill the level at which local government participation is required because I wanted the Department of Commerce and specifically the unit is the Office of Crime Victim Advocacy (OCVA) is under the Department of Commerce who's implementing this.

Part of the job right now is to actually talk to local governments who are actually pretty cash poor and financially constrained. What is realistic? What is a bar that is enough to make sure that they're actually investing and have skin in the game. But not prohibitive that they can't even apply in the first place.

And I don’t pretend to know what that threshold is and it may change over time. I mean, they may as economic fortunes improve maybe that changes.

But the thought would be, there's not a specific mechanism or manner in which it has to be rolled out.

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. So I could see that being compelling.

But they don't do DV really. I mean, that's not their specialty. Not that they never respond to a domestic violence call, but 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.

But my hope is, it’s a proof of concept, right? I didn't use the word “pilot” because it's ongoing funding. But if you can stand up a program and it works, maybe other local jurisdictions that aren't participating come to tour the program or do a ride-along and they hear about it from their peers, the local mayor, the local police chief about the efficacy of the program and then maybe they try to find local funding. Maybe they convince their city council like, "Hey, you know, Redmond's doing this, can we?.”

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.

Because the bill maybe peppers it around the state enough that people get curious or they start to learn or we get some local news coverage and wherever these grants get stood up. The program is enormously popular, the one that we have. It's in four police jurisdictions right now. The cops love it because they actually feel like they're doing something useful rather than giving this victim and their crying kid a piece of paper. Like, “here. Go fix your DV”.

And they also provide updates to the officers which actually helps improve that officer morale. It's like, “oh, that person was able to get services.”

They just really view the corresponder as such an asset. It makes them want to use that more.

Project Be Free just presented at the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs (WASPC) conference in May.

And they were able to say this bill passed and there will be money so if you're interested, get a couple of local jurisdictions together and see what can happen.

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: So peers were created in 2005 in Washington state first, at least on the mental health side. They only became Medicaid eligible on the substance use side in 2019. But I would say in the last like 5 to 10 years, they've sort of exploded on the scene. I would say it was a slow crawl for the first 10 years, and people were like, “peers, what?”

But 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. A huge potpourri of different life experiences.

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. Originally, when peers come on the scene, people were like, "that's not a valuable service.” But they're able to engage individuals in treatment who would, absent a peer, forever exist outside of healthcare.

They're able to go into tent encampments with outreach teams. I just spent half a day up in Everett with a street outreach team, going into these encampments.

And I was like, “How often do people like categorically come completely like f.u. refuse services?” And they were like, “Almost never.”

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.

Peers don't only go into encampments. Peers work in treatment agencies. 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.

And then peers are basically, we call them the water between the islands. And what I mean is you have, in the addiction treatment world, you have an island of detox. That's this provider. And then you have impatient treatment over here. And then you have recovery housing over here. And then you have employment, like how do I get a job with my felony conviction and interrupted work history over here. And you know people drown in the water between the islands, right? Like there is no boat, there is no captain, there is no map. And that's what a pier does.

They're like okay, let's break this down into manageable steps. Here are the three places I can get you into detox. I will give you a ride. And I will make sure that I pick you up from there. And I will already have gotten you into a bed for inpatient. And I will never leave you. I will never drop you.

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."

So it's really being someone's constant through a system that is very difficult to navigate.

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.

The overarching goal of the bill is sort of two things that I'm trying to achieve here.

One of them is (stop me if this is like overly 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.

Insurers are these giant behemoths that aren't super friendly to small peer-run organizations that don't have huge billing departments or any billing department.

When the state had money, which we did every year I've been there up until 2025, we would just be like…

In 2021, I helped create this thing called the Recovery Navigator Program, which we also have here up in Shoreline. It's a very popular, very effective program. It's all peer-run case management.

It was funded originally out of the Blake decision stuff, but it's totally funded with the state general fund.

At the time, we had enough general fund to go around, and it was easier to just be like, “here's this chunk of money, go do peer work”.

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.

And so at a really high level, what the bill does is it directs the healthcare authority to sort of contract with some kind of smart consultant shop person who can talk to insurers, health carriers, both Medicaid and non-Medicaid commercial carriers, and then talk to these smaller peer-run orgs who are super good at the feet-on-the-street work.

And figure out how can we bridge the gap between those two things.

Because right now there's a reason that all of these, BIPOC-run or peer-run orgs, are existing outside of the healthcare infrastructure. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are mechanisms like using a third-party administrator. You could have like an umbrella-type situation where you have one entity…

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.

And then it becomes economically feasible because of the economies of scale inherent in having all of these different sorts of nodes.

And the hope would be that we would still fund programs like the Recovery Navigator program, which is statewide at the same level.

But what if you were to offload, you know, 60 or 70% of the current costs to Medicaid? You could then take the state general fund that you're not spending on the part that now becomes billable and use it to expand your service, hire more people, expand your reach, etc.

Or you could use it for things that legitimately are not Medicaid reimbursable, like an emergency hotel night, like first month's rent, certain things that we're not allowed to bill for.

The other thing that the bill does is…

Another area that I work in is obviously DV victim services. Our federal funding; most of those services are funded federally through something called VOCA, which is the Victims Of Crime Act. And that is funded with these like large fines and forfeitures. And it makes it a super volatile funding source, and those have decreased substantially.

Yet our sexual assault agencies, DV agencies, are relying on that funding federally. And so what the state has been doing.

Basically, VOCA funds sort of three things. Sexual assault agencies, human trafficking agencies, and domestic violence agencies, victim services agencies, that don't do anything to do with peers currently.

But that funding is drying up federally. And so what the state has been doing the last four legislative sessions is we've been like, "Oh, you're missing 20 million in federal funding that you were expecting. We're going to give you 20 million of state dollars to make you whole."

But all of a sudden, we don't have any money. The state doesn't have any money to do that.

And so, we really need a predictable funding source for victim services. And so, my idea, which, it could either be great and totally work out or it could flop. But my idea was that

… I went through a training last fall at Domestic Violence Services of Snohomish County.

It was an 8-week training that one has to go through to work directly with DV survivors. And so I was sitting in the training and I come from this sort of peer world and I'm like well wait a damn second this is actually peer work. We're just not calling it that because everyone in the class with me was a DV survivor and most DV victim advocates are DV survivors. It's not a requirement but that's who gravitates to that profession.

I was just on a call yesterday related to human trafficking and nearly everyone on that call except for their contract lobbyist was a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation.

So by the letter of the law, that's peer work. You have the same lived experience as the people that you're serving. So my thought was if you called it that and 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 general fund 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 so that victim services agencies can kind of come into that world. 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.

But I'm like, if you got a little creative with how you're designating yourself, you could then actually, 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.

OJM: You did have a number of bills that didn't pass this session. What was the biggest challenge that you faced?

Rep Davis: I would say funding for behavioral health services. So you know the state came in with this $16 billion budget shortfall and the way we solved that budget shortfall was with $7 billion cuts to services and $9 billion in new taxes.

And it is true that there were, to be candid, certain areas of state government that had been unexamined for a really long time. And it was actually reasonable to eliminate certain programs that really weren't producing outcomes. They were passed by some legislature of yesteryear, right?

But there were not $7 billion worth of those. We ended up cutting not just the fat, but into the bone.

We cut all sorts of things, particularly things that I had fought for, mattered to me and mattered to my constituents. And a lot of things like recovery housing vouchers for people coming out of jail. Or treatment things like the recovery navigator program which is my baby that I created in 2021 that endured a 20% cut.

And it will still survive on that but obviously we still have massive challenges related to people with untreated behavioral health needs, homelessness.

The city of Shoreline, for instance, does this survey every two years. And pretty consistently the top three is public safety, homelessness. The Seattle Times just talked about a poll in the mayoral race in the city of Seattle: top three issues: public safety, homeless. It's the same and they're all interrelated with behavioral health at the center.

And so I have been trying to get targeted revenue increases that would go to fund behavioral health services. And I was not successful this last session and I really hope to sort of carry that torch into next session.

You know, in general, like most people don't super enjoy tax increases for the most part. I mean, at a broad level.

But the public tends to be much more receptive to tax increases if they know what it's going toward.

King County voters overwhelmingly passed the Crisis Care Center Levy because it was going to fund crisis receiving facilities.

King County voters also passed overwhelmingly the Harborview levy, you know, some years back too, in part because some of it was going to behavioral health and making sure that they have an excellent, level level-one trauma center, etc.

What is not popular is taxes that just go into the abyss of the state general fund. That is not popular. But when you can tie it to something like we tied our state capital gains tax to K-12 education and early learning. And that's part of why voters upheld it in 37 out of 39 counties is because it went to kids.

And so one example, I did drop a bill super late in session and I don't even remember the bill number. I can look it up, but it has to do with an opioid impact fee. It's been passed in other states, not here. You charge a per morphine milligram equivalent fee for every opioid that's actually sold in the state. So, this would target, like, Purdue Pharma and those types of entities and it generates serious revenue tens of millions of dollars per year that could then be scooped up and allocated to not just address some of the cuts we had to make to certain behavioral health programs this last session but actually to expand the provision of behavioral health services.

But the issue that we ran into last session was tax fatigue. The public and the media are correctly identifying the largest tax increase in state history. And so there was, like, “okay, are we going to tax another thing?”

And so that's the concern about my prospects for this kind of targeted behavioral health revenue increase next session is there going to be so much tax fatigue.

The legislature doesn't really have a strong history of passing revenue increases two years in a row.

So in my tenure in the legislature, we passed a big package of revenue increases in 2019, my first year, and then 2025. So it's like a six-year in between.

Not that we did nothing, but there was very, there wasn't a huge, actually, that's not true.

Cap Gains existed between those two things.

But the point is, it's not back-to-back years.

We also generally don't do a lot of revenue increases in even years because it's an election year.

OJM: Washington has the second-most regressive tax structure in the country. And it sounds like a lot of the barriers here for getting this work done is funding. Do you have an appetite for trying to address the regressive nature of the tax structure?

Rep Davis: I mean, I personally have a huge appetite for that, and I would say, speaking in broad strokes, most Democrats serving in Olympia have huge appetites for that.

What happened this session, we ended up building the house and senate budgets that were introduced were primarily built on this concept of a wealth tax.

It wasn't the only thing in them, but it was kind of the fulcrum. And it was the largest driver of projected revenue increase.

The governor, I think, fairly said maybe it's not the best idea to build the bulk of your budget on this legally untested idea because what if it doesn't work, right? Or what if the courts stop it? Or what if there's a referendum and it's repealed or whatever?

And so there was this concern that you'd blow this enormous hole in your budget if you were so reliant on this. And so what he said was if you wanted to do a smaller tax to basically test the legal viability of it, like something around the $100 million neighborhood, we could pursue that but not if we were banking on somewhere between like $8 and $12 billion. Some very, very large number for the wealth tax.

Unfortunately, the Senate actually, to their immense credit, passed a wealth tax off the floor on the very last day of session, mostly signaling it wasn't going to go anywhere.

But I would say there’s a huge appetite for that. The wealth tax is not the only mechanism, but it's a mechanism.

I very much support it and I think it would be very fruitful.

But the concern is that people will just move their money, right?That these ultra-wealthy people, it targets a small number of taxpayers. It depends on which dial you look at, but somewhere, you know, south of 3,000 taxpayers, not that many people.

And so that they would just work with their financial people and move their money, and that the collectibility on it would be very minimal.

So, that's a concern.

It's unfortunate that we didn't really do anything to address the regressivity of this last session, and the dials that we did increase were business and occupation tax, which is also flawed because it's your tax based on gross receipts and not profit.

And so it tends to hurt the most these sorts of low-margin, high-volume businesses, like grocery stores.

And then we did a sales tax increase by including different types of things in sales tax. So we basically relied on existing flawed mechanisms instead of creating new mechanisms.

OJM: Is there anything else that you want to talk about or cover? Anything else you think people should know about?

Rep Davis: I always remind people of this, the importance of contacting their lawmakers. My literal job title is representative, and who do I represent? The people of Shoreline, the people of Lynwood, right? The people of Northwest Seattle, Mountlake Terrace, etc.

And so, I do my best to obviously be as responsive as possible, but it's a two-way relationship and I really welcome people particularly when I'm home during the interim, you know, grabbing coffee and hearing what's on people's minds, what's most important to them, what they want. They're my boss, right?

So what they want me to be working on, if there are specific issues people are having with a state agency, what we call constituent case work.

If somebody's having an issue with unemployment or the Department of Licensing or something like that. All the way to bill ideas. For any of your readers, I would really encourage them to build their relationship with their state lawmakers.

The research literature suggests that only 2% of the American public knows who their state lawmaker is, let alone has ever talked to them.

But what that means in practice is that the relatively small number of people who actually talk to us have outsized power and influence because so few people talk to us. And so I just always encourage anyone to reach out and share your ideas, build that relationship, ask for the meeting. You know, we're home until January. So there's a good stretch and opportunity there.