FILE - An undated photo of the Supreme Court building in Washington.
Northwest News Network
An initiative voters passed in 2024 to keep the state from moving its energy grid away from natural gas violates Washington’s Constitution, a majority of the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
It’s a loss for Let’s Go Washington, a conservative-backed funder of a flurry of initiatives in the last few years intended to provide a check on Democrat-dominated Olympia. The group managed to get some initiatives through the legislature in 2024, but has only been able to pass this one initiative at the ballot box. The group has three more initiatives up for a vote statewide in November.
Washington’s homebuilders’ association, which originated and defended the initiative, expressed disappointment at the ruling but said they have no plans to appeal.
“Today’s decision represents a direct rejection of the clearly expressed will of Washington voters,” Greg Lane, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, said in a statement. “Nearly 2 million citizens voted in favor of Initiative 2066 because they believed families and businesses should retain the freedom to choose the energy source that best meets their needs. The Court has now taken that choice away from them. This is government telling the people, ‘Your opinion doesn’t matter.’”
Climate advocacy groups and Seattle and King County sued to throw out the legislation after it passed, saying it deceptively bundled too many subjects under one initiative, limiting local authority over air quality standards and amending statewide building codes as well as repealing a part of the Decarbonization Act.
“You’re presenting to voters a choice where you have to vote for something that is put out there as seemingly popular, and then you’re bundling it with other provisions that are not popular in order to get those passed,” said Kai Smith, a partner at Pacifica Law who argued against the initiative in King County Superior Court last year. “That is deceptive, and that’s why it’s prohibited. The legislature can’t do it, and we can’t do it through initiatives to voters either.”
Six of the nine Supreme Court justices signed onto a majority opinion that 2066 did include “four constitutionally distinct subjects,” and “it is impossible for us to assess which of these four subjects, if any, would have received majority support had they been presented alone at the November 2024 general election.”
“It is not possible by judicial construction to sever and save any of the separate provisions and therefore I-2066 is unconstitutional in its entirety,” said the majority opinion, which was signed by Chief Justice Debra Stephens and justices Raquel Montoya-Lewis, Steven Gonzalez, Colleen Melody, G. Helen Whitener, and Barbara Madsen, who has since retired.
Lane, of the Building Industry Association of Washington, argued in a post online that the decision “greatly” limits the legislature.
“All laws approved by the Legislature also must comply with this new standard created by the court, which puts many of the laws approved by the Legislature now in legal doubt,” he said.
The Washington Hospitality Association, the state’s hotels and restaurants group, also expressed disappointment in the ruling.
“This decision doesn’t change the underlying challenge our members face: the cost and feasibility of converting commercial kitchens and building systems away from natural gas,” Anthony Anton, president and CEO of the Washington Hospitality Association, said in a statement.
The Sierra Club and Washington Conservation Action, the Washington Solar Energy Industries Association, and Seattle’s City Attorney Erika Evans cheered the decision in public statements.
What this means for November initiatives
Opponents of Let’s Go Washington and its main sponsor, hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, used the win to call into question the constitutionality of the initiatives up for a vote in November.
Lawyers like Smith have pointed out constitutional concerns with Heywood’s initiative seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ sports. The initiative requires verification for women that it doesn’t require for men, which Smith said might violate the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.
“Brian Heywood has put together yet another sloppily written ballot measure that he probably didn’t even have a lawyer look at before he started gathering signatures,” Erik Houser, a spokesperson for the campaign to save the state’s so-called “millionaires tax,” wrote in an email. “Much like Tim Eyman for the better part of two decades, Heywood wastes the time of all Washingtonians while misleading his followers about the viability of his harebrained ideas.”
Heywood called that “hogwash” in a call with KUOW.
“They’re not arguing that natural gas should not be banned. They’re saying, ‘Oh, well, we don’t like the way that it was written.’ Are they arguing that boys should be allowed in girls’ sports? No. They know that they lose on that argument,” Heywood said. “ There’s this concerted government effort to take what is a fundamental Washingtonian right to address garbage that’s done by the government... to annihilate, to destroy the citizen’s right to redress.”
Scott Greenstone is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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