Well, Mayor Ed Murray, this is embarrassing for you.

Three members of the King County Council have introduced legislation to give all county employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave—triple the amount Seattle mayor Ed Murray and city council member Jean Godden recently announced city employees will soon get.

The proposed policy would apply to all county employees as soon as they're hired (the city's policy requires employees to be on the payroll for six months before they qualify). It also wouldn't require employees to use up all their sick and vacation days before using parental leave. The city's policy doesn't require that either, but some places with generous policies—like San Francisco—do.

I've already explained why paid parental leave is important in taking on the bigger issue of gender equity in the workplace, as well as how woefully behind the United States is on this.

“It is past time that the United States join the ranks of every single other developed nation in the world,” Rod Dembowski, the county council member who authored the policy, said in a written announcement Thursday, "and ensure that new moms and dads have an opportunity to bond with their child without sacrificing the very wages needed to support a family."

Hell. Yes.

But the policy still has to work its way through the committee process, get five council votes, and get support from King County executive Dow Constantine, who would then be responsible for creating the exact rules to implement it and including it in contracts with county unions. Somewhere in that process, the county—which has serious budget issues—has to figure out how to pay for it.

Dembowski told me Thursday afternoon he hasn't estimated the cost of hiring temp workers to replace county employees who would take advantage of the new policy. That'll be up to Constantine's office.

"The kind of numbers we're talking about in the overall scheme of the county budget are not significant," he said. "We've got to account for the cost we're incurring today of not having the policy." For Dembowski, that cost includes health care for babies who don't get enough time to bond with their parents, employees who leave their county jobs to stay home with new children, and potential job applicants who lose interest in county jobs because there's no paid parental leave.

The county council will have a hearing on the policy March 17 before voting on it and, if it passes, sending it on to Constantine. If this really gets approved, it'll leave Murray's effort looking small.

"We're not trying to one-up or outdo [the city]," Dembowski said. But he also insisted 12 weeks is an obvious place to start: "Twelve weeks, to me, is the right thing to do."