Year’s initiative filings down to 20-year low

OLYMPIA – Despite predictions in Olympia in recent years that ballot measures will strangle government in special-interest knots, the number of initiatives filed this year is tied for a 20-year low.

“It’s amazing how few there are,” said Michael Buckley, a government professor at Eastern Washington University.

Over the past five years, citizens and political groups have filed more than two dozen “initiatives to the people” each year. Two years ago, people filed a record-breaking 60 measures.

This year, however, that number dwindled to just nine. The last time citizens filed fewer initiatives was in 1985.

Why? A number of reasons, according to initiative veterans and political researchers. Some speculate that people’s political energies – and campaign cash – were sapped by last year’s presidential race and the ongoing battle over who really won the November governor’s race. And the military’s struggles in Iraq, some say, have made state political issues pale in comparison.

“When people are thinking about war, it’s kind of hard to get them enthused about re-enacting the I-601 spending limits,” said initiative veteran Tim Eyman.

Citizens’ initiatives are the reason teachers will get cost-of-living raises this year, you don’t pay sales tax on food and state politicians aren’t allowed to set their own salaries.

They’re also a headache for state lawmakers, who complain that voters, facing a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision on complicated proposals, often make shortsighted choices. Cities and counties have struggled with the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s unpopular motor vehicle excise tax, for instance.

Eyman’s 1999 “$30 Car Tabs” measure fueled interest in initiatives, which are essentially an end-run around reluctant state lawmakers. Anyone with $5 can launch one at the secretary of state’s office, although actually getting it on the ballot requires more than a quarter-million signatures. Few make it that far, and even fewer are approved by voters.

This year’s nine measures include a smoking ban for indoor public places, performance audits for state agencies and I-907, which would require Seattle residents to save fuel by “refrain(ing) from heating at least one bedroom from October to February.”

“I think we’re coming off a period of unusually high initiative activity,” said Washington State University political science Professor David Nice. “There was an outburst of activity that we couldn’t sustain. Political participation over the years tends to go in waves.”

There was a surge in Washington initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s, Buckley said.

“Then they went away for almost 40 years,” he said. “They were barely used.”

The reason for the 1970s initiative renaissance? California’s property-tax cap: Proposition 13. That spawned a copycat measure in Oregon and a renewed interest in initiatives throughout the West.

Today, worries about terrorism, homeland security and war abroad have distracted people from state issues, Nice said.

Also, there are easier ways than an initiative campaign for each party’s allies to get what they want. Republican interests – like business – generally have a friend in the Bush administration, Nice said.

“So they’re doing their shopping there, so to speak,” he said.

Democrats, meanwhile, control Washington’s state Senate, House of Representatives and governor’s mansion.

It also seems that some of the state’s most prolific initiative authors have simply gotten tired of filing measures that go nowhere.

“I’ve been really kind of depressed and slacking on the initiative process,” confessed Kurt Weinreich, an Olympia resident who proposed 15 different measures in 2001.

Among them: one to declare the state Bar Association unconstitutional, one throwing out all the state’s laws and one limiting federal laws to the District of Columbia, Guam and navigable waters.

Weinreich was also the architect of an initiative that would have banned the cutting of any tree – “a publicly-owned oxygen production facility” – on public land.

Weinreich’s proposals weren’t the only unusual ones. In recent years, initiatives have called for limiting political campaigns to two weeks, limiting bank interest to 3 percent and making it unlawful for the state’s top politicians “to be seen in the presence of lobbyists.” Two years ago, Initiative 831 sought to have Eyman officially declared a “horse’s ass.” All failed to gather enough signatures.

But there’s still plenty of potential out there for ballot measures, Weinreich said, particularly if the state would allow them to be circulated on regular 8½-by-11-inch paper instead of the big sheets now required. That change alone, he said, would allow people to easily e-mail and print out petitions among their friends instead of standing outside Safeway stores soliciting signatures from strangers. It would, he said, lead to a surge in successful initiatives.

“There’s easily 200,000 people out there that want to legalize marijuana, and they’ll get off their ass once a year to check the computer,” he said.

But, he said, he’s had enough of the process.

“I’m probably done,” he said. “I’m kind of burned out.”