This bill amends multiple sections of the Revised Code of Washington and adds a new section to chapter 43.59 RCW. It establishes the Washington traffic safety commission as a public health authority, creates a statutory definition framework (including terms such as bicyclist fatality, pedestrian fatality, serious injury, fatality review committee, motorist, and nonmotorist), and expands the commission’s procedural authority to convene fatality review committees and an active transportation safety council (the Cooper Jones council) to review traffic crashes that result in death or serious injury. The changes are primarily procedural and administrative: the commission may obtain and compile crash reports, toxicology reports, medical records, driver licensing records, and other investigation information; store linked health care and crash data in a secure database; perform statistical and epidemiological analyses; prepare anonymized reports (including sharing underlying anonymized data with the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation); and make recommendations on statutory, regulatory, ordinance, and policy changes. The bill makes review committee meetings and documents confidential, exempts specified traffic fatality review records from public inspection under RCW 42.56.360, renders committee deliberations inadmissible in civil or administrative proceedings (with stated exceptions), limits disclosure of confidential information, and provides immunity from civil liability for committee participants acting in good faith. It also requires the commission to include members of the Cooper Jones council in reviews of crashes that kill active transportation users (with attendance limited to fewer than a quorum), and it requires the council to meet at least quarterly and issue an annual report by December 31 to the governor and legislative transportation committees; the council may receive gifts and, subject to appropriation, award grants. These are changes to existing law and new procedural authorities and confidentiality protections rather than creation of new crimes or changes to criminal penalties. Important portions of the bill text are missing from the extracted material: the remainder of RCW 43.59.040(2)(a) is not included, the specific amendment text for RCW 43.59.156 is not shown, and some definitions and operational details (exact committee composition, membership rules, and full procedural protocols) are incomplete or absent from the provided excerpts.

If enacted, the bill gives the Washington Traffic Safety Commission a clear public‑health role and new powers to gather medical, crash, toxicology, and driver licensing information, link and analyze that information, convene a confidential fatality review committee, and run a Cooper Jones active transportation safety council that meets at least quarterly and gets annual reporting duties. The commission will routinely share anonymized findings with the University of Washington for research, can make policy and data‑quality recommendations, and may offer small targeted grants if money is appropriated. Hospitals, EMS, medical examiners, coroners, law enforcement, and the Department of Licensing are likely to face more frequent requests for records and participation in reviews; municipal and state agencies that join the council will receive reports and may be asked to implement recommendations. Practically, this concentrates more investigatory and analytic responsibility and limited discretionary funding with the commission and gives the Cooper Jones council an ongoing advisory role, while also insulating review discussions and most source documents from public disclosure and from use in civil or administrative cases. That will probably reduce legal exposure for reviewers and limit public access to underlying records, but it will also create administrative costs for agencies that must deliver records and for the commission to run reviews and report on findings; these activities are tied to legislative appropriations. Important operational details—such as exact membership rules, specific data‑sharing procedures, and the text of other amendments referenced in the bill—are not included in the provided facts, so the scope of record access and procedural safeguards remains partly unclear.