Seattle-area hedge fund executive Brian Heywood is back in the initiative game again. Heywood has announced two new measures he wants the legislature to address next year.
One continues the saga over Heywood’s Initiative 2081, the so-called Parents’ Bill of Rights. It was approved by the 2024 legislature, then changed by lawmakers in 2025. Heywood didn’t like the changes, so he’s asking legislators to drop them and re-instate the original version.
His second initiative is aimed at ensuring female athletes in the state’s public schools compete exclusively against female athletes. It would require athletes have their doctors provide school districts with proof of the students’ gender at birth.
“I’ve listened to several athletes from Spokane who have been directly impacted by this. And just in saying that we've got a legislature, an OSPI, a governor who are sort of hellbent on destroying women's sports," he said.
Heywood is one of the leading conservative voices in Washington. His advocacy of direct action by the people is similar to the work done by Luke Mayville and the group Reclaim Idaho. The legislature in Boise has worked to make it harder for Mayville to get his measures on the ballot. Heywood has complained lawmakers in Olympia are trying to do the same with his initiatives. We asked him about the parallels between the two states.
This interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brian Heywood: Well, I think that any state that has one party rule for a long time, regardless of the party, and I think that implies in Idaho as well, what you get is those in power, those entrenched in power, work their tails off to stop people not in power from having an impact. The initiative process was designed to go against that. But if you look at what the legislature tried to pull off this last year, they tried to shut us down. They tried to put much, much stricter requirements on the signatures we gathered than anything they put on voting. It was just outrageous. They tried to pass a law that made it harder to sign a signature and more legally risky to gather signatures than it is to vote in an election.
So the Washington state legislature did the same thing that they're trying to do in Idaho. In Idaho, it's Republicans that are trying to stop Democrats, and in Washington, it's Democrats trying to stop. And it's not even Republicans at some point, and we've tried to be very careful in our initiatives that they're not hyper-partisan issues. They are really common sense issues that have a broad appeal to a lot of people that think that the legislature has overstepped.
DN: Beyond the two initiatives you've recently announced, do you have a running list of other issues on your to-do list?
BH: There's sort of a never-ending list. Whenever I go, people are like, oh, this is the only way that we can get laws passed right now is to use the initiative process.
There's some issues on shoplifting. There are issues with homeless camping in public spaces. We'll see which ones of these we go with, but these are all ones that are there. We filed a bunch this year of property tax initiatives, and that's certainly on our radar.
We've got a bunch of drafts of things that we may or may not run. The other is school choice, finding the right way to push that through, especially with the new law that the governor looks like he's heading towards ignoring that allows, cost the state nothing, but allows people to give money towards scholarships for kids that are trapped in crappy schools.
DN: What are the lessons you've learned during your initiative signature gathering campaigns? [Heywood aims to collect at least 400-thousand signatures per measure.]
BH: The first thing that I learned was that I didn't know 400,000 people. So we've done a lot of work to try to change that.
Now, we've got about 1.2 million people that have signed at least one of our initiatives. And that makes a big difference. And it relates to communicating and gathering signatures. So we've been working on how do we better communicate with people.
If I can take a small tangent here, is my objective was never to, I never woke up and said, gosh, you know, it'd be cool if I could run initiatives, right? The objective is to make meaningful change in a state that is sort of 40 years of one-party rule. So one of the things is, you need to be able to communicate to enough people to have an impact. And so we've begun working on that.
We've got, like I said, about 1.2 million people who've already signed at least one of the initiatives, and we'll keep expanding that. Number two is that we were hugely outgunned in terms of money. In the last election in '24, the opposition spent $50 million against what we were able to raise is about $5 million. If we could get that down to a 4 to 1 versus a 10 to 1, there's a chance to get the message out there.
