For about 110 years, Washington residents who wanted to put initiatives before the people or legislature have paid five dollars to file their paperwork.
No more. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs says he has raised the initiative filing fee to $156.
Hobbs says he decided to revise the fee after reviewing his agency’s cost of counting signatures and processing paperwork and after learning he had the authority to do it. He didn’t need the legislature’s permission.
“All I did was take the rate of inflation, based on federal benchmarks, and then just tacked it on to the $5. I thought that was a fair amount,” he said. “This doesn’t stop the process of initiatives. All it does is align the cost in today’s dollars and I guarantee, in today’s world, to run an initiative it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Hobbs says even the $156 doesn’t cover the whole cost, if you consider the time his office, the attorney general and code reviser spend reviewing measures.
“I just think this is a matter of fairness. These things, it costs money, taxpayer money, to process these things. In 1922, 10 initiatives were filed. In 1942, five; 1962, four,” he said.
Now, Hobbs says dozens of measures are filed each year, some years more than a hundred. Many are nearly identical to each other. He says a few sponsors are trying to outmaneuver each other.
“People were trying to get to this really awesome number, 1776. So they’re all racing to get that and trying to do different variations of the same initiative to get to 1776. But in the meantime, every time you file an initiative, guess what, it has to go through the whole same process again,” he said.
Hobbs says initiative numbers will now be assigned at random.
He says sponsors of initiatives to the legislature are now paying the new fee. The price hike for initiatives to the people is a few months away.
