| By Tim Gruver and Paul Queary |
Washington’s high court handed a win to friends of greener energy last week in a blow to homebuilders and restaurateurs who sought to overturn restrictions on burning natural gas.
The tipping point in this fight came via the Supremes’ Thursday 6-3 ruling in which they upheld a lower court’s decision deeming Initiative 2066 unconstitutional. The measure was devised to curb several moves by the state to limit the use of natural gas on the basis they would stifle consumer choice, hike utility bills, and strain the electrical grid.
Backed primarily by the Building Industry Association of Washington – the state’s politically combative homebuilders group – and the Washington Hospitality Association, I-2066 survived the ballot box in 2024 with some 52% of the vote. The sponsors joined forces with conservative initiative machine Let’s Go Washington (LGW), and the measure was the only LGW effort to survive the voters that year.
Opponents of the measure didn’t spend heavily against it in 2024, choosing instead to focus on fighting the companion repeal of the Climate Commitment Act.
But after it passed, Climate Solutions and a host of other environmentalist nonprofits, local governments and others dragged I-2066 to King County Superior Court for paving over the state’s single-subject rule. It required, among other things, utilities and local governments to continue offering natural gas to eligible customers. It also restricted the state Utilities and Transportation Commission from greenlighting plans to effectively force customers away from gas. In addition, the initiative would have changed state building and energy codes aimed at promoting the use of electric heat pumps and water heaters.
The BIAW appealed, arguing that I-2066 should be treated like other large omnibus laws.
The Supremes disagreed, calling it a “patchwork” of policies involving gas supply, building codes, local government authority, and air-quality regulation. They concluded those provisions didn’t constitute a comprehensive solution to one problem.
The Supremes largely concurred with the lower court’s ruling. The majority wrote that I-2066’s provisions had substantially different regulatory effects. Guaranteeing access to natural gas, restricting air-quality regulators, and rewriting building-code authority weren’t merely different tools for accomplishing the same task, the court concluded. They were different subjects.
In its majority opinion, Justice Debra Stephens wrote that the rule applies to initiatives approved directly by voters just as it does to legislation passed by lawmakers.
Justices Sal Mungia, Charles Johnson, and Sheryl Gordon McCloud dissented.
In the dissent, Mungia equated the ruling to throwing out the baby, the bathwater and the plumbing. His take? Nearly all of I-2066 could be understood as having one central purpose: protecting consumers’ access to natural gas. That individual provisions affected different agencies or laws didn’t necessarily make them separate subjects. Almost every law changes the legal landscape somewhere else, he noted.
Thursday’s decision is déjà vu. The high court’s consistently been hard-core on the single-subject issue with regards to ballot initiatives. Anti-tax activist Tim Eyman’s Initiative 695, which passed in 1999, was thrown out because it both repealed the state motor vehicle excise tax and required a public vote on all tax increases. The Legislature killed the MVET anyway after the ruling.
Right on cue, environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club and the aforementioned Climate Solutions spiked the football in reaction to the ruling. Team I-2066 and LGW castigated the court for paving over the will of the voters.
Don’t look for any of these issues to go away. Energy costs are on the rise, and the region’s utilities have warned that keeping the lights on without new gas generation could get dicey in the near future.
Also, while it’s not accurate to describe I-2066 as a brainchild of Let’s Go Washington, it does represent another loss for that group. Of seven initiatives it qualified for the 2024 cycle, just one has made it permanently into law. LGW has three measures on this year’s ballot, including a measure to reverse one of those losses by repealing the Legislature’s changes to the Parents’ Bill of Rights.
A version of this story first appeared on the Washington Observer website.
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