Initiative 924 appears dead

Hooray - one less right wing initiative to worry about. This is very good news:

It appears that the First Class Education for Washington Initiative, which if passed would have forced school districts to spend 65 percent of their budgets on "classroom instruction," has been suspended.

Brian Janssen, chairman of the Initiative 924 campaign, wrote in an e-mail to the Washington Association of School Business Officials that he was unable to gather enough funds to ensure the campaign's success.

Janssen had been invited to attend the association's conference in May to discuss the initiative but declined, saying: "To ensure success we needed to run a multimillion-dollar campaign, with most of the funds frontloaded for kickoff. With my commitment to being a full-time father to my three young kids, I was unable to fully pursue this to the degree necessary and couldn't provide more funds than I'd already committed."

Janssen's e-mail didn't specify how long the campaign would be suspended or if the group would try to resurrect it later on.

[...]

According to reports filed with the commission, the group received $9,100 in contributions in January — $5,000 of which came from Janssen. The group did not file a report by March 10, the deadline to report any contributions over $200 for February.

There are so many right wing initiatives this year (others with serious backing include I-917, R-65, I-920, and I-933) that it was going to be difficult for Janssen to raise money for his own effort.

Unless you have a sugar daddy (like Eyman does) or you've got a coalition of groups with major money (like the Farm Bureau and the BIAW) it's very hard to raise enough money to buy your way onto the ballot. Brian Janssen just found that out the hard way.