Images courtesy of TVW
Housing and homelessness continue to be a major focus for the Governor as lawmakers continue their work on the state’s budget.
Governor Jay Inslee continues to push the legislature to approve his $4 billion dollar housing bond referendum because he says while right-of-way camp sweeps are getting hundreds into housing, they need to build more including places for rapid re-housing.
Inslee was asked about the impact of meeting with families near a Seattle camp that has parents there frustrated it wasn’t cleared sooner. “There’s John Stanford School. I met the teachers there, too. I understand that as a parent and as a grandparent I understand that,” Inslee says, “but that’s why we’ve been working so hard on it. We understand how frustrating this is. I’m frustrated by this as well. Maybe I’m the most frustrated person in the state.”
Inslee was also asked if camps where people have been murdered should be priorities and he says not always, adding, “You might have a higher priority for a larger camp. You might have a higher priority for a camp that has a much more different kind of criminal behavior. It is one of the things we consider when making these decisions.”
Republican leaders this week said the homelessness issue has been entirely on Inslee’s watch and that he has been “inept” at responding to it.
The Governor also says he’s concerned about a swiftly-moving Idaho bill that would make certain ‘abortion travel’ into Washington illegal. That bill, which has already passed one side of Idaho’s heavily Republican legislature, would make transporting a minor to another state for an abortion without parent or guardian consent ‘criminal trafficking’. Governor Inslee says people have the right to freely travel through this country so that law could be unconstitutional.
He says a shield law here could prevent Idaho from using Washington’s criminal justice system to harm anyone coming here to seek legal abortion services, “but we’re concerned that if the Idaho courts and the Idaho criminal justice system attempts to prevent people, even Washingtonians, from stepping across the line from Idaho to Washington, that is unacceptable. So the shield law could not control the Idaho courts. We’ve got to find a different mechanism.”
The Governor also says he and lawmakers are working on a way to maintain access to drugs used for so-called chemical abortions a federal judge in Texas decides to outlaw them.
