By The Herald Editorial Board
There isn’t much out there that for a $5 bill in 1913 you could have gotten 101 years later for the same half a sawbuck. As of March 9, that list got even shorter.
Earlier this month, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs announced that the fee his office charges to file initiatives to the Legislature had increased — from the $5 that has been charged since the initiative process was established in a 1912 state constitutional amendment — to an inflation-adjusted $156.
For those in the practice — or business — of filing initiatives to get them before the Legislature or the voters, that represents a cumulative price change of nearly 30,035 percent, perhaps putting the current U.S. inflation rate of 3.15 percent into perspective.
“The expenses generated in multiple state agencies for processing each and every filing of a potential ballot measure are not what they used to be in 1913, and our fee structure must reflect that,” Hobbs said in a March 8 press release, calling the increase an overdue recognition of inflation.
And, whether at $5 or $156, that fee still won’t come close to covering what facilitating the initiative process costs the taxpayers.
Once an initiative is filed and the fee paid:
A code reviser has seven days to review the initiative’s text, recommend new language and issue a certificate of review, which can then be accepted or rejected by the initiative supporter.
The backer than has 15 business days to submit the final text of the initiative, which is then assigned a initiative number and sent to the state Attorney General’s Office.
The AG’s office then issues a ballot title and description within five days and requests a fiscal impact statement from the Office of Financial Management. The initiative’s backer is then allowed five days to accept or challenge the text of the title and description in court.
Once the wording of the title and description is set, supporters can gather signatures, which then are verified by the Secretary of State’s office to confirm they belong to legally registered voters.
The initiative then is submitted to the Legislature, which can either enact it into law; take no action, which places it on the November ballot; or propose an alternative which would appear along with the original initiative on the ballot.
This year, six initiatives made it as far as the Legislature, which held debates and approved three, and sent three more directly to the November ballot.
But scores of initiatives are proposed each year, each requiring the same administrative review. The secretary of state’s office, in the century-plus of initiatives in the state, has received more than 1,825 proposals, with 60 percent of that number filed since 2000, the release said. In 2022 alone, 121 initiatives were filed, with two people filing 61 percent of the total.
The initiative process — especially in giving the voting public a direct route to writing and adopting public policy — is a legitimate use of taxpayer support. But in recent years, some initiative backers have used the rock-bottom $5 fee to their advantage.
As recently as 2015, some of those folks — let’s call them the League of Initiative Frequent Filers — have capitalized on the low fee in order to file multiple versions of the same proposal with only minor changes, with the hopes of getting assigned a “catchy” initiative number or ballot title.
Tim Eyman, in past years among the league’s more prolific initiative backers, filed some 86 initiatives in 2016, only to withdraw 61 of them later. But that year, Eyman was late in announcing his withdrawal of one initiative that had made it as far as review by a Thurston County Superior Court judge, regarding a challenge by Eyman of the measure’s wording. The judge, the morning of the hearing, spent up to two hours reviewing briefs, only to learn moments before the hearing that the initiative had been withdrawn.
The judge fined Eyman $600 for the oversight.
The backer of the six initiatives filed that advanced this year, state Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, filed 69 proposals last year, with backing from the Let’s Go Washington political action committee, founded by Brian Heywood, a Redmond-based hedge fund manager. This year, Walsh has so far filed three initiatives, all on the same subject.
Another frequent filer, Larry Jensen, has filed 23 this year, seven of which address the same subject, with two to three versions of others, most filed prior to the fee change.
Walsh told the Washington State Standard that while the new fee won’t deter his efforts — Heywood can see to that — “it certainly isn’t respecting the people’s initiative process.”
Eyman, meanwhile, is threatening a lawsuit to protect “the process for the next generation of imitative activists,” challenging Hobbs’ authority to increase the fee and claiming the Legislature had not given him that ability.
However, Andrew Villeneuve, founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, who has filed his share of initiatives in recent years — including three this year on separate subjects — made a deep dive into state law to show that while state lawmakers have previously considered increases to the fee in the past, state law does give the secretary of state authority to set those fees.
“The dollar amount for the initiative filing fee isn’t set in state law. It’s set by rule … a rule the Secretary of State has the authority to change,” Villeneuve wrote in a blog post in The Cascadia Advocate.
Hobbs, he notes, followed the rule-making process set out in state law to increase the fee. Hobbs also has randomized how numbers will be assigned to initiatives; a 10-sided die will be thrown.
For those filing initiatives that seek changes or additions to state law, the $156 filing fee shouldn’t represent an obtrusive hurdle; those campaign will have greater costs ahead of them in gathering signatures and campaigning for a measure’s passage. And, the increase may or may not discourage the League of Initiative Frequent Filers from submitting multiple versions of the same proposal, just to game the system.
But that doesn’t mean that the state has to keep it cheap for them to do so.
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