Olympia Update: Guns and Gas

Let’s Go Washington guns for the ballot again

Conservative megadonor Brian Heywood’s ballot measure machine is cranking up again. Let’s Go Washington announced this week that it will collect signatures for two initiatives to the Legislature likely to fire up the Republican base. 

Initiative 26-001 would repeal the Legislature’s revisions to the Parents’ Bill of Rights, a LGW initiative that lawmakers approved back in 2024 rather than allow it to go to the ballot. Initiative 26-638 would bar transgender girls participating in girls’ sports, a hot-button issue in national politics.

Notably absent from this year’s slate from LGW is anything related to tax relief, a perennial issue in ballot-measure politics on the right. The group’s measures to repeal the capital-gains tax and the Climate Commitment Act — which many consumers experience as a back-door fuel tax — failed last year. 

However, it’s not clear that Heywood’s organization has the financial horsepower to get the measures on the ballot. After plowing millions of Heywood’s personal fortune into the 2024 slate and more than $500,000 on legal fees and other expenses this year, the PAC had just $41,000 in hand as of its most recent filing with the Public Disclosure Commission. Putting an initiative before the Legislature requires 308,911 valid signatures by Jan. 2, a heavy and expensive lift. 

The war on gas heads to the Supremes

The voter-approved rollback of attempts to temper the use of natural gas goes under the legal microscope at the state’s high court soon. 

Initiative 2066 made it past the ballot box with some two million votes, buoyed by the backing of the Building Industry Association of Washington and its allies. Its primary goal was to gut legislation allowing Puget Sound Energy to move its customers from gas to electric at a faster clip. Folks in the real-estate business were a hard nope to that in light of its added costs to home building. Curtailing natural gas was among climate-minded Democrats’ top priorities in 2024 when then-Gov. Jay Inslee signed it into law.

A King County Superior court judge tossed the measure after its opponents — environmental groups among them — sued on the grounds that it broke the single-subject rule by paving over a suite of related state and local building codes. The Supremes may hear the case as soon as this fall.

These dispatches also appear in the author’s Washington Observer.