The shared insurance pool that covers nearly two-thirds of Washington counties ended 2025 without being sure it had enough money to pay the counties' estimated cost of lawsuits, forcing them to tap their general funds intended for basic functions.
“Our members are running deficits, cutting into fund balances, making cuts into their vital services,” Derek Young, director of the Washington State Association of Counties, which lobbies for counties’ interests, said in a Zoom interview.
Counties are preparing to ask the Legislature for help, seeking to roll back laws and court decisions they say are driving the crisis.
Last year, the counties in the Washington Counties Risk Pool “did not have sufficient cash and investments at year-end to cover its unpaid claims liabilities,” according to an August report by the state auditor's office.
That budget gap for the risk pool’s 24 mostly average-size counties from Grays Harbor to Spokane “was about $25.3 million short for the total asset test,” the report stated. “This shortage increases the possibility that the Pool would not be able to cover its members’ unpaid claims.
Washington lawmakers in 2024 expanded the statute of limitations on certain types of lawsuits, which opened the door to claims for alleged sexual abuse stretching back to the 1970s and threw counties’ liability estimation process into chaos, said Chuck Boyd, executive director of the counties’ risk pool.
“The biggest thing is the unpredictability. We’re having to react to something that was out of our control and isn’t being funded by the state,” Boyd said in a phone interview.
The number of claims against the Washington Counties Risk Pool climbed to more than 700 in 2024 from fewer than 500 in 2020, according to a July report from the Washington State Association of Counties.
Those counties’ claims liabilities rose from $67 million in 2024 to $123 million last year, according to the state auditor.
And it isn’t just the cost of lawsuits that went up. The pool hiked its base rate to members by 35% this year, taking an additional $17 million from those counties’ general funds. From 2022 through 2024, their rate hikes totaled $22 million, the state auditor reported.
“What the Washington Counties Risk Pool is going through … (is) a part of this bigger liability challenge and crisis that all counties and local governments in general are facing,” Young said.
Soaring costs associated with lawsuits are plaguing the state of Washington as well. Its self-insurance pool paid out more than $1 billion in judgments and settlements of legal claims over the past three years, and reported that it began the current fiscal year $1.7 billion short of its expected claims liabilities. Lawsuits are gnawing into the state budget, which included a $1.1 billion supplemental line item to prop up the state’s self-insurance fund.
Since 2020, only one other shared-risk pool in the state, the Washington Schools Risk Management Pool, has failed Washington’s statutory solvency test, which requires certainty from pools that they have enough money to cover expected legal claims, according to Jennifer Reynolds, a Department of Enterprise Services spokesperson.
King, Pierce counties balance budgets, lawsuits
King County is self-insured, and there are no indications it’s moving toward insolvency, said Jessica Kozma, director of the King County office of risk management services. Prosecuting attorneys defend many of King County’s lawsuits, sparing the expense of hiring outside counsel, Kozma said. The 24 counties in the risk pool hire outside counsel for the vast majority of lawsuits, Boyd said. The state of Washington also has faced growing legal bills from outside attorneys to defend lawsuits.
“There are similarities (with other Washington counties) and challenges being faced as far as litigation. But as far as the funding challenges, King County is adequately funded for its liabilities,” Kozma said in a Zoom interview.
In Pierce County, which is also self-insured, “there have been significant budget impacts,” said Kari Plog, spokesperson for Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello. “Currently, these lawsuits have not resulted in any significant reductions in county services.”
Pierce County faces nearly $1 billion in potential damages from lawsuits, most involving sexual abuse allegations at a juvenile detention center, plus “$1.6 million annually to handle the increased workload” in the county prosecutor’s office, Plog said. Pierce County has an annual budget of $463 million, she said.
The Pierce County Council on Oct. 13 adopted a resolution laying out its legislative agenda for the upcoming session in Olympia that prioritizes tort reform. Mello testified last session in favor of a failed bill that would have required civil arbitration for tort claims against government entities in the state.
“You can expect local governments, including Pierce County, to continue making this a top priority for the 2027 legislative agenda,” Plog said.
Victims versus the government
A committee commissioned by the Legislature and appointed by the governor to study tort reform, which could curtail lawsuits against the government, is scheduled to deliver its recommendations on Nov. 1. The Tort Study Committee’s process has faced criticism from some lawmakers, lawyers and victims rights advocates for not including victims’ voices.
“I don’t know what it’s going to look like. But the situation is so dire that I don’t believe the government and legislature are going to say, ‘Let the criminal justice system or other county services collapse,’” said Young, of the counties association. “We need action, and it needs to be this year.
Young contends that the Legislature and judges in Washington have created a wide-open pathway to lawsuits that exposes the government to additional liability, even when others are at fault.
For example, he said, if an auto accident happened and the victim sued the at-fault driver and the county where the crash happened, a jury could find the driver 80% responsible and the county 20% responsible, but the county would be liable for any amount of a judgment ordered by a jury that the driver couldn’t afford to pay.
“Washington is basically alone,” Young said. “Nobody else does it that way. Over the years, that has created some problems.” His association’s July report outlined laws and legal decisions that expose government bodies to unique legal liabilities that don’t exist in other states.
In a written statement in response to questions from The Seattle Times, Brionna Aho, Gov. Bob Ferguson’s spokesperson, said the governor looks forward to reviewing the committee’s recommendations and expects “this will be a topic of conversation in the upcoming legislative session.” Ferguson has not declared a position on tort reform.
Limiting pathways to sue the government would deny sexual abuse victims the justice they’re owed, according to Washington’s trial lawyers, who lobbied in favor of some of the laws the counties hope to change.
The trial lawyers’ position is that the counties have overstated the extent that shared liability and the expanded statute of limitations have affected them. Other laws and decisions are driving the crisis, said Kelli Carson, government affairs director for the Washington State Association for Justice, which represents the lobbying interests of trial lawyers. She said the trial lawyers are willing to help fix some of the factors driving lawsuits.
Carson specifically mentioned direct solicitation of clients by attorneys, which the Legislature authorized in 2021 over the trial lawyers’ objections. It enabled lawyers in Washington for the first time to contact and encourage potential clients to file lawsuits, and allowed aggregators to bundle claims, sometimes by the hundreds, and sell them to law firms.
“All of these things are being left out of the conversation,” Carson said.
She blamed some counties’ reluctance to settle claims for reasonable amounts, instead gambling at trial and losing large judgments, for some of the counties’ financial struggles.
Restricting citizens’ ability to sue the government, Carson said, “is to say we are going to treat the government like a king, simply because our tax dollars pay for you. I don’t think that’s going to be a popular position for people.”
Boyd said the risk pool he heads seeks to settle cases fairly and its financial shortfall has not changed that. He said the counties aren’t trying to keep victims from pursuing justice with their legislative efforts.
“Finding a solution for everyone that’s amicable on these historic sex abuse cases, while paying what we owe when someone is wronged, that’s the goal,” he said.
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