According to Rachel La Corte at the Associated Press, that's the word from legislative proponents of implementing our state's thus far unfunded and unadministered new paid family leave law. Both the House and Senate versions of the implementation bill failed to make yesterday's house-of-origin cut-off. According to the article:
Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, said she and a fellow Democrat, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson of Seattle, decided to pull the bill because they feared Republicans would use up valuable floor time Tuesday debating the merits of the overall program, which became law last year.
"There's still a fight against the fundamentals of the program," Keiser said. "Rather than go through that exercise, we decided to try and make it easy."
It will be interesting to watch this play out. The implementation bills contained some important policy direction, and there were amendments in the works to add more. Policy is generally an inappropriate subject for the state budget.
In light of Dick Davis's musings here on the state of the budget in general, it will also be interesting to see if trying to implement the program trough the budget makes anything "easy".
And keep in mind this is just to provide direction on the most early rudiments of initial administration of the program. The move to the budget is not designed, as I understand it, to do what budgets normally do, and that is fund the program.
And of course without the money to put the "paid" in paid family leave, there remains no "there" there.
