Former prolific initiative promoter and office chair pilferer Tim Eyman suffered another total defeat in court last Friday when his groundless lawsuit challenging the legality of Secretary of State Steve Hobbs’ initiative reform rulemaking was dismissed with prejudice by Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Lanese.
Lanese upheld recent changes to the Washington Administrative Code (WAC) proposed by Secretary Hobbs and supported by our team at NPI. One of those changes raised the initiative filing fee from $5 to $156, while another specified a new format for initiative designations. Both changes were made to mitigate abuse of the people’s initiative power by bad actors such as Eyman. (Though his initiative business is now defunct, Eyman continues to file initiative drafts that he has no resources to qualify for the ballot.)
Because Eyman wasn’t paying attention, he wasn’t aware that Secretary Hobbs had proposed these long overdue changes. As the law requires, Secretary Hobbs published multiple notices many months apart advising the public of his intent to adopt new WACs, and his office also held a hearing at which members of the public could provide input. After the conclusion of the rulemaking process, Hobbs announced that the new WACs were going into effect. So far, they’ve only taken effect for initiatives to the Legislature. They won’t take effect for initiatives to the people until next year.
Eyman asserted that Hobbs had no authority to change the filing fee, even though the law gives him that authority. Ridiculously, Eyman falsely claimed that the Legislature had reserved for itself the power to set the fee when it failed to pass Jeanne Kohl-Welles’ proposals to put a dollar amount for the fee into the Revised Code of Washington. As I explained here a few weeks ago, the Legislature’s decision not to pass those bills actually did the opposite: it left the power to set the fee in the Secretary’s hands.
Even though I provided a very clear explanation of the law — an explanation I am confident Tim Eyman saw, since he is a reader of this publication — he chose to sue Hobbs anyway and repeat an argument that he had been told was ridiculous in front of Judge Lanese. The predictable result was a ruling from Lanese politely telling Eyman his reading of the law was wrong and upholding Hobbs’ rulemaking:
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED the Petitioner’s Petition for Declaratory Judgment is DENIED and his petition is DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE.
Much of the Petitioner’s briefing in this matter focused on why the Respondent should not have raised the filing fee for initiatives. But the issue before the court is not whether Respondent should have raised the filing fee for initiatives, but rather whether Respondent violated the law when he did so. The plain language of RCW 29A.72.010(3) and RCW 43.07.120 grant the Respondent the authority necessary to raise the filing fee, as initiatives are recorded with the Secretary of State’s Office. Failed legislation is irrelevant to this determination, as legislation may fail for countless reasons, including but not limited to proposed legislation being unnecessary.
Additionally, for the reasons identified by Respondent, there is no constitutional provision that prohibits increasing filing fees for initiatives and the adoption of the higher filing fee did not violate the Administrative Procedures Act.
Eyman was publicly holding out hope last week that Lanese might side with him.
In a Friday afternoon email, he told his followers:
Over the years, Judge Lanese has shown himself to be one of the few judges in Thurston County who actually reads the briefs submitted.
So when I walked up to the lecturn [sic] to give my oral argument, I knew he already read my arguments, reviewed my evidence, and evaluated my briefs, declarations, exhibits, & other supporting documents.
Eyman filed his legal challenge as a pro se petitioner, meaning that he represented himself. He went to a lot of trouble to hype his court appearance, exhorting his followers to join him in court. (Several answered the call.) Neither the facts nor the law were on Eyman’s side, so all he could do was pound the table, metaphorically speaking.
He showed up for oral argument and proceeded to whine about how awful and unfair the rulemaking process was, implying that it must have been rigged since neither he nor his buddy Jim Walsh knew about the proposed WACs. He also told the Court that he was indigent and claimed he couldn’t afford to pay the $156 filing fee.
However, that’s nonsense. Eyman’s personal finances are in a sorry state, but he still has a mailing list of thousands of ultra MAGA Republican friends… people who like him and his destructive political agenda. For each initiative he might want to file, he just needs thirty-one of his friends to give him $5 each, and then the cost to his personal checking account to file an initiative will be the same as before: almost nothing.
The filing fee was $5 when the initiative process was added to Washington’s Constitution over a century ago, so the newly increased fee is actually not any higher than what people filing initiatives in those days would have paid in 1910s dollars. Under the new WACs, the fee is also set to be adjusted upwards for inflation in the future so that it doesn’t remain at $156 for another one hundred and something years.
The fee increase is not meant to stop people from exercising their constitutional rights as Eyman has claimed. It also doesn’t prevent the abusive practice of ballot title shopping — filing many versions of the same initiative in the hopes of getting a good-sounding description of its contents from the Attorney General’s office.
But it does deter that abusive practice, because now sponsors have to provide funds that cover a larger share of the state’s costs to process an initiative.
Filing ten versions of five different ideas for initiatives to the 2025 Legislature, for example, will now cost $7,800 instead of a mere $250.
The state’s processing costs mainly pertain to staff time.
When an initiative is filed, the Elections Division has to process the paperwork for it and send it to the Code Reviser for examination and review. The Code Reviser then has to provide recommendations as to form. Then, once the sponsor files the final text, the Attorney General’s office has to write a statement of subject, concise description, and a summary, and the Secretary of State has to assign a number.
At $156, the fee provides a contribution to cover those costs equivalent to what a sponsor would have paid during the first few years that we had an initiative process.
I don’t see the appellate courts taking an appeal of this decision, so this is the end of the road for Eyman’s legal challenge. The new WACs will remain in effect and there’s nothing Tim Eyman can do about it. It is fitting that both Eyman and Jim Walsh failed on the very same day — and in the very same courthouse — to overturn initiative reforms that our team at NPI has worked hard to secure.
Walsh, for his part, was hoping to evade the NPI-championed law passed in 2022 that requires fiscal transparency in initiative descriptions. His lawsuit failed too. He’s contemplating an appeal, but his odds of success are basically nil.
These rulings are an affirmation that our initiative reforms are wholly legal and constitutional. For too long, it was possible for bad actors such as Eyman to abuse the people’s initiative power in their pursuit of bad laws that would destroy Washington State’s essential public services. But those days are over. We’ve put up critical safeguards to protect our democracy that are already working well. And we have even more safeguards in the pipeline to provide additional protection against future bad actors.
Judge Chris Lanese dismisses Tim Eyman’s groundless legal challenge to initiative filing fee increase is a post from NPI's Cascadia Advocate, the journal of the Northwest Progressive Institute. Published continuously since March of 2004, NPI's Cascadia Advocate provides thoughtful commentary and analysis on regional, national, and world politics. Keep The Cascadia Advocate going by making a contribution to sustain NPI's research and advocacy here.