Committee advances bill to add ‘feather alert’ and update missing-person notices

The State and Local Government Committee advanced bill 1535, focused on adding a ‘‘feather alert’’ to the state’s emergency-alert system and updating definitions for other missing-person notices, after voting 6-0 to approve an amendment and to recommend the bill for further consideration.

Chairwoman Rohrs opened the discussion by saying the committee had worked through several drafts and outside feedback to reach a compromise. ‘‘If you guys remember back to Senator Larson’s bill that updated the code and brought all of our alerts into one section of code…we were able to start amending from that bill,’’ Rohrs said, explaining the bill builds on recently enacted code changes.

The amendment the committee approved (amendment 4,006 as described in committee) adds language that explicitly creates a ‘‘feather alert notice’’ defined as ‘‘an urgent bulletin using the emergency alert system to air a description of an Indigenous individual who’s been abducted or is…