A few days ago, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs implemented new rules for filing initiatives and referenda in the Evergreen State which raised the cost of filing initiatives from five dollars to $156, in a long overdue move that I testified in support of back in February at an administrative rulemaking hearing.
Right wing activist Tim Eyman, who used to be in the business of qualifying initiatives to the ballot every year, quickly took notice… and as our team anticipated, he isn’t happy about the increase.
Eyman fired off a letter to Secretary Hobbs telling him that he would be showing up in Olympia to file initiatives to the 2025 Washington State Legislature and that he expected to pay just five dollars. He subsequently circulated a copy of his “demand letter” to his list of followers and the press. Here it is:
Dear Secretary Hobbs:
Tomorrow (Wed, March 13) is the first day for citizens to file an initiative to the legislature.
I will be filing several initiatives on various topics tomorrow. However, this morning a friend forwarded me a news story reporting that your office unilaterally raised the initiative filing fee from $5 to $156 starting tomorrow.
You have no authority to unilaterally increase initiative filing fees.
The chapter governing state initiative and referendum is chapter 29A.72 RCW.
The legislature delegated to your office the authority to adopt rules establishing reasonable fees for specifically identified chapters and Titles, but chapter 29A.72 RCW governing initiatives is not listed.
If the legislature had intended to grant your office unilateral authority to raise filing fees for initiatives, it could have done so but did not.
This statement of fact is bolstered by instances where the legislature considered increasing those fees and decided to keep them the same.
During the 2007 legislative session, Senate Bill 5392 was introduced. A public hearing was conducted on January 30 and I testified on it. The bill was not passed into law – the legislature decided not to increase the fee.
During the 2010 legislative session, Senate Bill 6665 was introduced. A public hearing was conducted on January 21. I testified on that one too. The bill was not passed into law – the legislature decided not to increase the fee.
The Legislature has specifically retained authority regarding the filing fee amount and has repeatedly decided the amount should remain the same.
You have no authority to unilaterally increase filing fees for initiatives.
Therefore, for my initiatives that’ll be filed tomorrow morning, your office must accept them with the legislature-defined amount of $5.00 per initiative.
If that does not happen, you will force me to file a lawsuit against you and your office.
Please respond by 5:00 pm today because time is of the essence.
Tim Eyman
Emphasis is Eyman’s.
Hobbs’ office sensibly did not bother responding to the above. When Eyman showed up, he was required to pay the $156 fee for the two initiatives that he wished to file, and did so, as confirmed by The Washington State Standard’s Jerry Cornfield in an article published today about the filing fee increase.
Eyman’s insistence that Hobbs has “no authority” to increase filing fees for initiatives when state law clearly states that he does is amusing — and telling.
You might think that someone who has been trying to change state law for decades and has sponsored dozens of initiatives seeking to do so would have acquired a basic understanding of it. But you would be mistaken.
Not only is Tim Eyman bad at writing law, he’s bad at reading it, too.
Here are the relevant statutes. First, RCW 29A.72.010:
Filing proposed measures with secretary of state.
If any legal voter of the state, either individually or on behalf of an organization, desires to petition the legislature to enact a proposed measure, or submit a proposed initiative measure to the people, or order that a referendum of all or part of any act, bill, or law, passed by the legislature be submitted to the people, he or she shall file with the secretary of state:
(1) A legible copy of the measure proposed, or the act or part of such act on which a referendum is desired;
(2) A signed affidavit, or electronic submission, that the sponsor is a registered voter; and
(3) A filing fee prescribed under RCW 43.07.120.
In that last subsection, you can see the Secretary of State is authorized to charge a filing fee, prescribed under a different RCW. Let’s look at that one:
Fees — Rules.
(1) The secretary of state must establish by rule and collect the fees in this subsection:
(a) For a copy of any law, resolution, record, or other document or paper on file in the secretary’s office;
(b) For any certificate under seal;
(c) For filing and recording trademark;
(d) For each deed or patent of land issued by the governor;
(e) For recording miscellaneous records, papers, or other documents.
(2) The secretary of state may adopt rules under chapter 34.05 RCW establishing reasonable fees for the following services rendered under chapter 23.95 RCW, Title 23B RCW, chapter 18.100, 19.09, 19.77, 23.86, 23.90, 24.03A, 24.06, 24.12, 24.20, 24.24, 24.28, 24.36, *25.04, 25.15, 25.10, 25.05, or 26.60 RCW:
(a) Any service rendered in-person at the secretary of state’s office;
(b) Any expedited service;
(c) The electronic or facsimile transmittal of information from corporation records or copies of documents;
(d) The providing of information by micrographic or other reduced-format compilation;
(e) The handling of checks, drafts, or credit or debit cards upon adoption of rules authorizing their use for which sufficient funds are not on deposit; and
(f) Special search charges.
(3) To facilitate the collection of fees, the secretary of state may establish accounts for deposits by persons who may frequently be assessed such fees to pay the fees as they are assessed. The secretary of state may make whatever arrangements with those persons as may be necessary to carry out this section.
(4) The secretary of state may adopt rules for the use of credit or debit cards for payment of fees.
(5) No member of the legislature, state officer, justice of the supreme court, judge of the court of appeals, or judge of the superior court may be charged for any search relative to matters pertaining to the duties of his or her office; nor may such official be charged for a certified copy of any law or resolution passed by the legislature relative to his or her official duties, if such law has not been published as a state law.
This section has five subsections. Eyman cited the second subection in his letter, writing: “The legislature delegated to your office the authority to adopt rules establishing reasonable fees for specifically identified chapters and Titles, but chapter 29A.72 RCW governing initiatives is not listed.”
However, it is irrelevant that the second subsection doesn’t mention chapter 29A.72 since the first subsection is applicable. It says: “The secretary of state must establish by rule and collect the fees in this subsection… For a copy of any law, resolution, record, or other document or paper on file in the secretary’s office” (a) as well as “For recording miscellaneous records, papers, or other documents” (e). This first subsection encompasses initiatives.
The Legislature explicitly gave the Secretary of State the authority to set initiative filing fees when writing chapter 29A.72 — that is why RCW 29A.72.010 refers to “A filing fee prescribed under RCW 43.07.120.” This line would make absolutely no sense if RCW 43.07.120 then didn’t apply to initiatives as Eyman argues.
You can see for yourself that there is no mention of five dollars in RCW 29A.72.010. That’s because 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, and did change after following the requisite process for amending WACs.
Eyman’s argument that the “Legislature has specifically retained authority regarding the filing fee amount and has repeatedly decided the amount should remain the same” is laughably false. The opposite is actually true: when the Legislature did not pass the bills that Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles sponsored to increase the filing fee in 2007 and 2010, it left the authority to set the fee with the Secretary of State. Kohl-Welles had proposed amending RCW 29A.72.010 to specify a particular dollar amount. Had either of her bills passed, then the filing fee would have become an amount fixed in law, unchangeable by Hobbs.
Here’s the relevant bit from Kohl-Welles’ first bill, considered in 2007:
Sec. 2. RCW 29A.72.010 and 2003 c 111 s 1802 are each amended to read as follows:
If any legal voter of the state, either individually or on behalf of an organization, desires to petition the legislature to enact a proposed measure, or submit a proposed initiative measure to th people, or order that a referendum of all or part of any act, bill, or law, passed by the legislature be submitted to the people, he or she shall file with the secretary of state a legible copy of the measure proposed, or the act or part of such act on which a referendum is desired, accompanied by an affidavit that the sponsor is a legal voter and a filing fee ((
prescribed under RCW 43.07.120)) of one hundred dollars. The filing fee shall be refunded in full upon the measure being certified by the secretary of state for the general election ballot.
You can see that “prescribed under RCW 43.07.120” would have been deleted, and a specific dollar amount, one hundred dollars, would have been added. That dollar amount would then not have been administratively adjustable.
But since neither of Kohl-Welles’ bills passed, Secretary Hobbs was able to not only update the fee, but provide for its continual upward adjustment in the future through a change to the Washington Administrative Code.
Tim Eyman likely never considered that his opposition to Senator Kohl-Welles’ legislation would one day set the stage for an even better change to the filing fee that will prevent the fee from going out of date again.
Because Hobbs followed the law in making this change to the fee, Eyman’s legal challenge will go nowhere. He and others will simply have to pay the higher fee whenever they want to file initiatives in the future.
As I told The Standard’s Jerry Cornfield, this is fair and reasonable:
Every time an initiative is filed, work must be performed by the Secretary of State’s elections staff, the Code Reviser’s staff, and the Attorney General’s office. There are costs involved with that work. Elections are a public service just like highways, transit, parks, libraries, policing, and fire protection — they aren’t free. The updated filing fee obligates sponsors to provide the same level of financial support for their initiative filings that sponsors in the 1910s had to provide, which is fair and reasonable and respectful of the public servants who work for we the people.
More initiative reforms are needed to ensure that our sacred powers of initiative and referendum are protected from bad actors. We have more good ideas in the pipeline and are looking forward to bringing them to fruition. Our goal is to ensure that the deception and abuse of the past cannot occur in the future.
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