The bill amends RCW 18.106.070 and RCW 19.28.211 and adds a new section to chapter 49.04 RCW. It allows applicants renewing plumbing and electrician certificates to count up to four hours of behavioral health and wellness continuing education toward renewal requirements; that training must include at least two hours of instruction and cover high-level behavioral health topics such as destigmatizing behavioral health, recognizing signs of distress and crisis, substance use awareness, and peer support and resource connection. This is a change to continuing education requirements (procedural change) rather than a new criminal or penalty provision. The bill also requires that, beginning July 1, 2027, apprenticeship programs for building or construction trades approved by the apprenticeship council must provide and require apprentices to complete behavioral health and wellness training. Any new or updated apprenticeship program standards approved on or after that date must incorporate the required hours, and at least two hours of instruction are required in addition to a program’s minimum related or supplemental instruction. Other existing plumbing and electrician rules and procedures shown in the text are retained or continued: electrician certificates and temporary permits grant statewide authority to work without additional local licensing; plumbing renewals require 24 hours of continuing education (with minimums for specialties and electrical safety), there are prescribed renewal timing and late-renewal penalties, trainee supervision rules and trainee-to-supervisor ratios (with specified reductions after December 31, 2028), medical gas piping supervision rules, minimum classroom training hours, advisory board work group duties and reporting, and department authority to accept comparable out-of-state continuing education and to set fees by rule. The provided excerpts are incomplete in places: the specific agency referred to as “the department” is not named here, some lines are truncated, and other sections of the bill and the full text of the new section to chapter 49.04 RCW were not included in the extracted facts.

If enacted, plumbers, electricians, and their apprentices will start seeing behavioral health and wellness training folded into required education: apprentices in building and construction trades must complete at least two hours of this training starting July 1, 2027, and up to four hours of such training can count toward plumbing and electrician continuing education requirements now. Apprenticeship programs and the apprenticeship council will need to add that instruction to curricula and approval standards, which means program staff must update training plans and apprentices will spend extra time in required classes; apprenticeship programs and employers may face modest administrative or curriculum costs to deliver the training. The department and plumbing advisory board will also have ongoing duties to convene and report on trainee ratio changes, with member reimbursements paid from existing department funding. The bill also tightens onsite supervision and trainee limits that affect how many apprentices or trainees a supervising plumber can have, keeping current higher limits until the end of 2028 but reducing some crew ratios afterward, and it keeps strict one-to-one direct supervision for medical gas piping work. Those supervision and ratio changes are likely to reduce how many trainees a single supervisor can oversee on residential jobs, which could increase labor costs or slow staffing on projects and shift supervisory workload to employers. Some context is missing from the provided text (the specific agency named as "the department" and the rest of the bill language), so precise administrative assignments and any additional costs or exceptions in the omitted sections are unclear.