- Without question, the election on November 5th is historic.

The hotly-contested races on the ballot might be a distraction from some important statewide initiatives.

Coming up, we'll break down what they mean and how those initiatives would impact your life.

That's next.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] This is a KSPS PBS election special.

(dramatic music) A discussion of the initiatives facing Washington voters.

- Ballots have been mailed, and tonight we break down what the four statewide ballot initiatives really mean.

Helping us do that is a panel of local government experts.

Good evening, I'm Aaron Luna.

With us tonight, former City Council President Ben Stuckart, reporter with "InvestigateWest," Daniel Walters, and professor at Eastern Washington University, specializing in Washington State Government, Dr. Kevin Pirch.

I thank you all for being here this evening.

Let's start with the basics here.

Dr. Pirch, what exactly are ballot initiatives?

What role do they play in lawmaking?

- Ballot initiatives are a way for the people to bypass the state legislature and the lawmaking process.

What it does is allows for individual people or other entities, if they want to, to get enough registered voters' signatures to put a proposed law onto the ballot.

And so then instead of going to Olympia and going through the how a bill becomes a law process that we're familiar with, it's just a simple "yes" or "no" vote of all the voters in Washington State.

- And so it has to be signatures to get it on the ballot.

- Yeah, there needs to be enough signatures to get on the ballot so we don't clutter the ballot with maybe dozens or hundreds, I mean, you think theoretically of these initiatives.

So prove that you actually have enough support in the state to get it on the ballot.

And then the Secretary of State checks those, makes sure that they're legal and legitimate registered voters in the State of Washington.

And if you get enough, then it will go on the ballot.

- And in fact, Washington State is one of the first states to actually implement initiatives, I think, back in 1912.

And basically it was the confluence.

You had the progressive movement and the populous movement saying, "We wanna reform government.

We want to take more direct control of government."

It was sort of a win, they saw it as this big win for democracy over kind of the traditional constitutional republic that America was founded on.

And so since then, it's been a really, really big deal in Washington State.

It's how we got our Public Records Act that requires transparency of elected officials.

It's how we got marijuana legalization.

It's how we got gay marriage.

- And on this election ballot, we have two different types of initiatives here.

One directed at the people of Washington in three initiatives, and those are to the legislature.

What's the difference here when we're talking about legislative versus people?

- The process through the legislature means that the very first step in this, after you get the signatures, is it goes to the state legislature, and the state legislature gets the ballot initiative, and they have the option to pass a law if they want to, and then we don't vote on it, or they could do nothing or reject it, either one of those.

And then it comes to us, the voters.

Or else they could propose an alternative to it.

And so the majority of the time, it's about 15 times, they just send it to the people and say, "We either reject this outright" or "We want the people to decide."

Whereas the initiative to the people just bypasses Olympia completely, and then it just goes straight to all of the voters.

- So the legislature last session actually passed three, didn't they?

- Yeah.

- And those were direct passage.

And so to me, that's one of the risks of the initiative process is that it derails what the legislature did.

Because at the end of the legislature, they were just focused on making sure some of these didn't make it to the ballot in an election year instead of, they were doing a billionaire's business instead of the people's business.

- And in fact, the initiatives are the one rare area where Republicans have been able to have some bit of leverage this year.

A lot of them were reporting on things like efforts to try to reform the property tax and change the way the property tax is calculated.

A lot of the Democrats, even including the Democrats who, one of the Democrats who sponsored it, were pulling back and tried to undo and withdraw their legislation because they were worried that voter backlash would create more support for these initiatives.

And so what it does do in some ways is it gives the minority party an option to say, "Here are the pieces of our agenda we think are more popular.

We're gonna try to get those passed," despite the fact that the legislature is controlled by Democrats or the legislature is controlled by Republicans.

And so in Washington State, that means that voters have said, "Hey, we want our card tabs to cost only $30," repeatedly.

"We don't want our taxes to be so high."

While as in next door, Idaho, they've said, "Hey, despite the Republicans hating Obamacare, we actually want to expand Medicaid."

And so that could be a real advantage or disadvantage depending on the actual, what you think about the actual policies.

- Okay, let's dive into what these initiatives say.

We're gonna go run through them in order of how they are listed on your ballot.

So feel free to grab yours at home, follow along as we go.

Starting with Initiative Measure Number 2066.

This is one, it's an initiative to the people, on your ballot it reads, "Initiative Measure Number 2066" concerns regulating energy services, including natural gas and electrification.

"This measure would repeal or prohibit certain laws and regulations that discourage natural gas use and/or promote electrification and require certain utilities and local governments to provide natural gas to eligible customers."

This initiative would repeal regulations around the use of natural gas in the home.

What are those regulations currently?

- Well, I know the legislature negotiated with Puget Sound Energy to come up with an off ramp for natural gas.

And this is really, they didn't negotiate that with Avista, because if you look at Avista's energy mix, we couldn't do without natural gas right now in the mix.

You have your solar, you have your wind, you have your hydro, we've gone off of coal and Avista's closing coal strip this year.

But you still have the need for the natural gas.

But eventually, if you believe the science, that we're gonna need to eventually get off of natural gas.

But I think it's a timing issue, and you can't ban something all the way into the future if you believe that we eventually need to get off it.

I think that's where, I can see like with the housing market and you're in a housing crisis, you don't want to make it more expensive to build houses or ban certain things.

And I know I talk to the home builders a lot about that, and that's a concern.

But this seems like almost a straw man where they're like, "They're gonna ban natural gas."

And we're just not talking about that in Eastern Washington.

- And I'll disclose that my fiance works for a utility company, and so I don't wanna get too deep into this.

I can say that I, with covering Republicans, they've been very eager to try to use the concerns and people wanting to protect natural gas as a way to turn out their voters and as a way to sort of push back against this agenda.

What they have seen is they've seen a real opportunity here, again, to sort of get their voters turned out.

- And we've seen the motivation behind the original measure was to address climate change issues.

And while Washingtonians have historically voted in favor of changes like this, the pushback has been quite significant.

- I mean, I think some of this goes back to, I mean, if you've heard, there's been talk about banning natural gas ranges or other stoves or something.

And I think you're exactly right that part of this is just, it's an issue that motivates a certain part of the electorate and gets them going out and getting out and to vote.

And natural gas is really popular in some quarters.

- Well, and I think, we live in Eastern Washington, and I know of two specific wind storms where our power went out and our heating was our natural gas fireplace.

So that immediately comes to my mind when I think of it.

So creating the boogeyman even works on me where I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to get rid of my only heating source."

And if you've never lived through one of those wind storms where you're out of power for five days and your house is... - You're grasping at everything you can.

- Yeah.

- And the people that are in charge of the Washington State Building Code have implemented policies that have limited some types of natural gas in new construction.

And so I think that from talking to Republicans, a lot of the times they see a potential slippery slope there.

- And you like to cook.

- Yeah, I do.

- I cook on my gas stove.

- Actually, one of the big things is that I should not, I should not have natural gas because I am distracted when I cook.

And so there's an actual danger there.

I've had too many electrical fires in my electrical range to wanna justify natural gas myself.

So that's just speaking personally.

It's like a real danger to myself and others.

- Another tension with this issue would just, that we could touch on is the idea of state versus local authority, how it would affect local governments when you have a ban state.

I mean, Ben talked about this.

We just have kind of that mix of diversification of energy resources, but we also talk about local versus state government and the opinions there.

- Well, again, I think this is part of a motivation of getting out your base, right?

I mean, if you are more supportive of local versus state government and believe that most regulations are best handled by the government closest to you, then you're not really excited probably about the state coming in and making these kind of decisions on your behalf.

So again, it's a really good way to motivate, a lot of Republicans and more conservatives to get out and vote with this initiative.

- Let's move on to the second initiative on the ballot, and the first one that's an initiative to the legislature.

Let's look at this full screen, Initiative Number 2109.

It's about taxes.

It reads, "This measure would repeal an excise tax imposed on the sale or exchange of certain long-term capital assets by individuals who have annual capital gains of more than 250,000.

This measure would decrease funding for K-12 education, higher education, school construction, early learning, and childcare."

Always a lot of questions when it comes to taxes.

This initiative would repeal the capital gains tax that was passed in 2021.

It might be useful to briefly define what is considered a capital gain and what should voters know about that tax.

- I do know in this initiative it only applies to 0.2% of the population actually hit the income gain on sales of their taxes and bonds in order to get taxed.

And so this is a tax that was passed on the wealthy.

And what this did was we used to be the most regressive state in the country, our tax structure, and we're now the second most regressive state.

So it's not like we took the system and flipped it upside down and said, "We're the most regressive, unfair tax system and we flipped it and we're now the most progressive."

we moved one spot because of this.

So it's not an inordinate amount for the top 2% of the state to pay is the argument.

- And to be clear what that means when we're talking about regressive is that the poor people in Washington State paid a bigger percentage of their income in taxes, particularly because of a high sales tax, than anyone else in any other state in the nation.

And the rich people paid a very little amount.

And now Florida is a little bit ahead of us on that measure, but we're still, and this was kind of seen as a big victory for Democrats who have been really kind of critical of that feature of our tax system for a really long time.

- And that tax, it was challenged in court and upheld by the Washington Supreme Court last year.

- Yeah.

- It was challenged.

So just to back up one step, in case anyone's curious.

So a capital gains tax isn't a tax on income or on your labor, but it's a tax on stocks and bonds or other types of investment vehicles.

And so if you buy a stock for $100,000 and you sell it for $120,000, the capital gains tax would be on that $20,000 difference between what you bought it for and what you sold it for.

And so this tax would first of all only start at, was originally $250,000, but it's indexing for inflation, and it's also limited to what it's actually taxing on.

So it's not taxing your home, if you sell that, it's not taxing if you own timber land, you're not getting taxed on that, or if you're in agriculture, it's not taxing your cattle or your horses, if your primary income is cattle or horses.

What it's really taxing is if you're selling over 200 or on your retirement.

So if you are incredibly wealthy, in my universe, and you're selling $250,000 worth of stock, that would be where the taxes come in on.

There was a court, this faced a lawsuit because they argued that that was an income tax, which is unconstitutional in Washington State.

Made its way all the way up to the Washington State Supreme Court where they ruled that capital gains taxes aren't actually income taxes.

- And you talk to Republicans, and their concern is oftentimes that, "Hey, this is sort of a foot in the door, that this is going to be a way that in the future this might be expanded and expanded, expanded until effectively you have an income tax for a lot of the residents.

And so that's kind of the argument that they give when I ask them about, "This affects two or three people, why are we worried about this?"

- What's the fiscal impact of repealing capital gains tax?

- [Ben] Well, I think you looked it up.

- Oh yeah, I don't remember, that was a long time ago.

- Three, no three, wasn't the fiscal impact 3/4 of the city of Spokane- - Yeah, it was about 750, roughly 750, 760,000, sorry, 760,000,000 annually.

So yeah, so about 3/4 of the City of Spokane.

- And that money's all targeted to childcare, education.

We're in a childcare crisis, as anybody with kids knows right now.

It's really hard and very expensive, childcare is.

Ever since they solved the education funding with McCleary, we know they haven't, we have districts across the state that are, Seattle in particular, talking about cutting and closing 20 schools, and that doesn't even touch their budget deficit.

And so if we think we need less money for education and less money for childcare, then that would cut those directly.

If we think we should be spending more on our education system and spending more on childcare for our population, then this is probably not an initiative you wanna support.

- And part of the challenge with funding education is because of our property taxes and the way that property taxes are limited and how fast they can go up because of previous initiatives that ended up getting ratified by the legislature as well.

But that's an example of how sometimes previous initiatives can create challenges for the legislature.

- Are we're seeing local impact as well?

- We could see a local impact on, I mean, if you're cutting education funding, that's gonna be cut.

Spokane public schools is second largest school district in the state, so you would feel that there.

The other challenge of this is, because this tax only being paid by 0.2% of our population, it's an incredibly fickle tax to rely on.

I mean, if they decide not to sell their stocks that year, or if something happens with the market and there's a decline, then this tax is incredibly fickle.

Jeff Bezos moved out of Washington State and he's adamant that he did not move out because of the tax.

But, I mean, if you have a very fickle tax, it's on a very small population, it is a little bit scary to rely on that for your education.

You need that money for your schools, but it's not good.

I don't need to tell you about planning long-term for budgets and how important that is.

This is a tricky one to make for long-term budgeting planning.

- So then why tie that to the education budget?

- Well, I think they wanted to make it very clear to the voters that if we're gonna implement this tax, this is where your money is going.

And the reason they rely on fickle taxes is because of the initiative previous that doesn't allow our state constitution change, that doesn't allow for income tax, which is a much more progressive and less regressive tax.

And the way our property taxes are structured locally, which is that you're only allowed to raise them 1% a year, which some years, as you know, and inflation is shooting up and your costs as an organization are going up higher than 1%, 1% increase isn't really gonna cover those increases in costs.

But it's also a way for the citizens to exercise their authority of, "Whoa, keep it under control, government."

- And if you increase property taxes dramatically, then there's gonna be a bunch of sympathetic stories about, these are these old ladies who've been living in this house for a very long time and they're on fixed income and all of a sudden their property taxes are going up quite a bit.

And a lot of people don't want to actually pursue that.

But if it's a bunch of rich people, I think the thinking is the voters won't care to be as sympathetic if they're very rich people- - They won't balk when they see the wording.

The next initiative on the ballot also concerns taxes, this time regarding carbon tax credit trading.

Take a look at your screen, Measure Number 2117 says, "It would prohibit state agencies from imposing any type of carbon tax credit trading and repeal legislation establishing a cap and invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This measure would decrease funding for investments in transportation, clean air, renewable energy, conservation, and emissions reduction."

Let's start with really the first thing we need to understand for this one, what is carbon tax trading?

It's a complicated question.

Who wants to tackle this one?

- Professor Pirch can answer that one.

- I'll take a a stab at this.

So there's really, one school of thought about how to reduce carbon emissions is to treat those carbon emissions of pollutions like a commodity where you can go out there and you have rights to go out and pollute and you can take your rights and you can sell them or you can buy them as you need.

And every year, or every couple years or whatever the policy makers decide, you can reduce the amount of pollution that's allowed.

Which if you reduce the amount of pollution that's allowed, the ability to pollute there becomes a little bit more valuable.

So the idea of capping is to go out there and say there can only be this much carbon that's emitted from the State of Washington or the United States or wherever else it is.

And so this would then be cap and invest where you take the money that they've used for polluting and then use that money to invest in other programs, infrastructure, transit, or something along those lines.

So the plan with this would be cap how much pollution is allowed, how much carbon emission is allowed in the State of Washington, with some exemptions, and then charge those polluters a certain amount of money for that.

And then every so often reduce the amount of carbon that you're allowing to go out there and emit.

It's one of the theories about how to reduce carbon, how to get people off the carbon, let the free market find the most efficient use of those carbon credits.

- There's a cost to polluting.

There's a cost to carbon emissions that we aren't paying right now.

It's costing everyone, a cost to society, it's climate change.

The idea is you try to like actually impose a cost.

- Yeah.

- And then people react to it.

- Yeah.

- And that's been the theory, it's been something that Governor Inslee has tried to push for a very long time and repeatedly kind of failed.

When he ran for president, this was sort of a kind of a demerit in terms of his argument that, "I really, really care about climate change."

But eventually this did get passed.

- And opponents have called it the gas tax.

- Let's be honest, gas prices aren't gonna go down if this passes, they're not.

The market's gonna take care of itself and even out.

And you're not gonna see a noticeable decrease of gas prices at the pump.

What you are gonna see is a noticeable decrease in, and even though those dollars are targeted towards transportation, alternative transportation and transit right now, those aren't gonna be given up by the legislature, and you're gonna see road cuts.

If this passes, you're gonna see road cuts.

Transportation projects around the state will be cut by the $500 million this is bringing in every year.

- And that would impact business or job growth throughout the state.

- There's a real debate even within Inslee's own administration about whether or not this major, were it passed, would impact gas taxes.

There was somebody that, KING 5 interviewed a former economist that argued that he had been punished because he tried to speak out about this and he was sort of limited from the way to speak out, arguing that it would impact gas prices.

And so this is sort of like one of those ongoing debates, and it's really hard, with everything, like how do you sort of, because there's so many different things that go into gas prices, to what degree was this directly responsible?

It could be hard to say.

- But to your point, I mean, without talking about this policy specifically, the idea behind these policies in general is you make it more expensive for the users so that they find other more efficient ways, alternatives to do this.

So I mean, if one of the main drivers of climate change and carbon emission in the State of Washington is automobiles, then the theory is you need to raise prices on gasoline so that people say, "It's actually better for me to take the bus," or "It's better for me to walk or take a bike because that's the more efficient, more economical solution to it."

- Washington's gas tax is pretty high compared to a lot of other states.

But also, you do see a lot of people driving giant, giant trucks without anything in the back.

So there are still people that are making the choice to drive these giant vehicles despite the high gas taxes.

So you can probably slot that into either side of the argument.

- Oh, I was just gonna say that, I mean, that's kind of the market at work, right?

Somebody out there is driving a giant truck and saying, "This is worth it to me.

I'd rather pay the high cost for this than to buy a Prius," or something like that, where others will say, "That's it, I'm buying a bus pass now."

- Let's move on to our final statewide initiative.

That's Measure 2124, which on your ballot will read, "Initiative Measure Number 2124," concerns long-term care insurance.

"This measure would provide that employees and self-employed people must elect to keep coverage under RCW 50B.04 and could opt out any time.

It would also repeal a law governing an exemption for employees.

This measure would decrease funding for Washington's public insurance program providing long-term care benefits and services."

There's a lot packed in there, so let's start with the long-term care insurance, which is in reference to the Washington Cares Fund that was established in 2019.

Can you explain what that fund is and why it was created?

- We're paying out of our paychecks, and it I think provides a maximum benefit of $36,000 a year, or maybe is it 36,000... - [Aaron] I believe it's 36.

- Is it annually?

And so if we look at that, that's still just a small portion of my mom is in long-term care and she had a really good policy that they don't even sell anymore.

And she was really, really lucky that she'd gotten that policy.

But after the last few years, she would've completely depleted all her savings.

And I don't know what we'd be doing for caretaking for her if she didn't have that.

And so everybody, the argument is, everybody should have a backstop like that, the insurance system, and this is a small incremental step.

- And we're facing a demographic time bomb where all of a sudden you have all these baby boomers, this huge kind of population that's all of a sudden getting into their older, older ages.

Whereas people like me, the millennials, didn't have enough kids 'cause we graduated into recession.

And so the population base is a lot smaller there.

And so we're gonna all of a sudden gonna have the entire healthcare system and everything meant to serve old people really at a moment of crisis.

And so this is sort of like trying to recognize that.

The question is, of course, the debate is, is this the right solution to it?

- And how does the fiscal impact of changing the program play out here?

I mean, we're talking about a baseline for nothing, one step up, is there a fiscal impact that we should be aware of?

- I think long term as our population ages and the baby boomers keep retiring and then you have Gen X retiring and you're gonna see there's hidden costs and societal costs for not taking care of our aging population.

- And this initiative would allow people to opt out of the program to help with long-term care.

So the question is, if enough people opt out, is this gonna create sort of a death spiral and make the program not worth it for anyone?

And that was sort of the theory with the individual mandate for Obamacare.

You may remember the debate about that.

However, when that was, ended up, it's always hard to predict these things.

So the individual mandate was repealed that enough people felt it was worth it to continue to get insurance that, there was some reduction, but it actually didn't cause the sort of death spiral that people were afraid of.

- And a lot of people opted out when it first came into knowledge, into public awareness.

A lot of people opted out and got their own insurance.

- [Ben] Yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, there was a substantial number of people- - [Daniel] The requirement was to get insurance, yeah.

- Yeah, got their insurance and then opted out.

That's no longer an option now, so that everybody who is working in Washington State now has to be a part of this program if they haven't opted out.

- Is there not some people that are still excluded from that?

- No, you're right.

So if you are a veteran and you've got certain programs through the VA or you're a federal employee and you have those benefits through the federal government, there are some people, but the majority of people in the State of Washington are in the system now.

- And I believe that's all the time we have for this evening.

We hope it's been helpful and educational.

Maybe you even filled out your ballot while watching.

Remember, your ballots need to be postmarked by Tuesday, November 5th.

You don't have to wait to send them in.

You can also drop them off at local libraries and the elections office.

Your voice, your vote matters.

Thank you again to our panel, Ben, Daniel, Dr. Pirch, we appreciate your expertise and time.

I'm Aaron Luna for KSPS PBS, goodnight.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] Don't miss your opportunity to vote.

You can still register online until October 28th and in person until 8:00 PM on election day.

(dramatic music)