Washington voters to weigh in on state’s new income taxFree

Washington voters will get their chance in November to embrace or reject the state’s new income tax on households with earnings greater than a million dollars a year.

The secretary of state’s office certified Initiative 645 on July 15, two weeks after sponsors turned in more than 500,000 signatures on petitions to put the measure on the ballot.

“We’re grateful for the dedication of the Secretary of State’s office to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of signatures gathered are validly counted,” said Brian Heywood, founder of Let’s Go Washington, the political committee that ran the signature-gathering effort.

He poked at Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson and state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, sponsor of the income tax law, for not putting the controversial measure directly on the ballot themselves. Ferguson signed the law in March. Collections of the tax are set to begin in 2029.

“Today’s verification proves that Washingtonians will have their voice heard this November, no matter how hard Jamie Pedersen and Bob Ferguson worked to keep them out of the process,” Heywood said.

Let’s Go Washington submitted 509,365 signatures. State election officials sampled 3 percent, which is 15,281, and found 12,936 were valid registered voters, a validity rate of more than 80 percent.

A “yes” vote on the initiative will repeal the 9.9 percent tax on individual and household wage income above $1 million a year. The initiative leaves in place tax breaks for families and small businesses, and the expansion of a tax credit program for lower-income families built into the law. It also will prohibit local governments from imposing any income tax.

A “no” vote will uphold the entire law, including the statewide income tax.

Certification, which had been expected, came one day after initiative opponents, including Ferguson, held a press conference to kick off their campaign to defeat the measure.

They contend that without the estimated $3 billion a year in revenues from the income tax, Ferguson and lawmakers will need to find other sources of money to pay for those tax relief provisions. Or they would have to be scrapped. That would essentially mean maintaining the status quo.

Ferguson framed the measure as a decision between upholding the tax and “moving our state forward by making life more affordable for Washingtonians,” or rejecting it and “going backwards.”

In the meantime, a potential legal bout looms.

By July 23, the state attorney general must put out a “public investment impact disclosure” statement that will be on ballots. It must be a single sentence of no more than 15 words listing the top three categories of state services that would be affected if the initiative is approved.

Challenges to that language must be filed in court within three days.

Separately, the state Office of Financial Management will prepare a statement detailing the initiative’s potential fiscal consequences. That will be posted online.

Washington voters have been asked 11 times to approve personal or corporate income taxes. The first vote, in 1932, was successful. But that measure was struck down by the state Supreme Court on a 5-4 decision in 1933. Later measures failed.