The Thurston County Superior Court hearing over the Public Investment Impact Disclosure (PIID) for the income-tax repeal initiative should have focused on one narrow question: Did the Attorney General comply with the law’s neutrality requirement? Yet as the hearing unfolded, Judge Chris Lanese spent much of his time explaining why voters considering a tax repeal need to be confronted with the government’s argument about spending, why tax-cut initiatives do not tell the whole story and how Washington risks a “downward regressive spiral” if that argument is left off the ballot.
By the time he upheld the warning, Judge Lanese had done more than interpret the PIID law; he had made the policy case for it.
Under state law, the Attorney General must write the disclosure in neutral language that cannot reasonably be expected to create prejudice for or against an initiative. For IP26-645, which would repeal Washington’s new income tax, the resulting sentence tells voters that the measure “would decrease funding” for K-12 schools, higher education and human services, primarily health care.
Challenger Arthur West argued that the statement was biased. Judge Lanese responded by asking whether initiatives seeking to reduce taxes are themselves “not neutral” when they do not identify the government services that might be affected, then wondered whether naming what would supposedly be cut is what makes the ballot neutral because it shows voters “both sides of the ledger.”
Missing from that line of questioning was the distinction at the center of the case. A citizen initiative is a policy proposal, not a government-produced voter guide, and its sponsors have no obligation to include the state’s preferred rebuttal in the measure. The law places its neutrality requirement on the official disclosure, not on the citizens proposing a change in policy.
What Judge Lanese substituted was a very different standard, one in which a warning becomes neutral when it supplies an argument he believes tax-cut proponents have omitted. Following that logic, the government may use the ballot to answer a citizen initiative so long as the judge agrees that voters need to hear the other side. Far from creating neutrality, that gives the state a taxpayer-funded opportunity to campaign against the measure at the point where voters make their decision.
As the exchange continued, it became harder to treat this as an abstract disagreement over statutory interpretation. Judge Lanese warned that Washington could continue a “downward regressive spiral” in its tax system and suggested state budgeting is broken because nobody wants to pay taxes while leaving someone else to make the spending cuts.
Whatever their merits in a legislative debate, those are political arguments for a more progressive tax code and a larger stream of revenue. They do not answer whether the Attorney General’s sentence complies with the neutrality requirement. Even if Washington voters wanted the most regressive tax system in the country, that would be their decision, not Judge Lanese’s. They are free to reject a new income tax, conclude that state government spends too much or demand that lawmakers live within existing revenue. A judge cannot treat those choices as irresponsible and then call the state’s opposing argument neutral.
What do the numbers show?
If Judge Lanese was going to lecture voters about the cause of Washington’s budget problems, he should at least have described those problems accurately. The state operating budget has grown from roughly $33.6 billion in 2013-15 to more than $80 billion today, an increase of about 139%. Even after adjusting for population and inflation, state spending is up roughly 55%.
Nor did that growth occur while lawmakers stood by helplessly as taxpayers refused to contribute. In 2025, they approved a package of tax increases expected to collect about $9.4 billion over four years, then followed it with a new income tax in 2026. Despite all that additional money, the state is again projecting budget deficits in 2027.
In any event, IP26-645 cannot be blamed for a current budget problem. The tax it would repeal applies to 2028 earnings and produces its first revenue in 2029, so no current appropriation depends on it.
Once the timing and destination of the money are clear, the wording of the PIID becomes even harder to defend. IP26-645 does not cut an appropriation for a single school, college, hospital or health-care provider. Only 5% of the future income-tax revenue has a fixed allocation to the Fair Start for Kids Account; the rest goes into the general fund, where future legislatures will decide how it is spent.
That is why, as I told The Center Square a few weeks ago, voters should separate what the initiative actually does from speculation about what a future Legislature might do.
Later in the hearing, Judge Lanese conceded that “there’s no direct cut” in the initiative, while the state acknowledged that nearly any tax-reduction initiative primarily affecting the general fund would receive essentially the same warning naming the same three popular spending categories. The sentence is therefore not describing a cut made by IP26-645; it is a generic warning attached to almost any measure that would reduce general-fund revenue.
To get around that problem, the ruling relied on a semantic distinction. Judge Lanese said the PIID does not claim that spending will be cut, only that the revenue available for those programs will decline. Yet the word “available” does not appear in the disclosure. Voters are told directly that the initiative “would decrease funding” for schools, colleges and health care, even though the judge acknowledged the measure makes no direct cut to any of them.
Near the end of the ruling came the clearest contradiction. Judge Lanese said the disclosure does not put “a finger on the scale,” then defended it on the ground that voters should be forced to consider spending cuts because they might otherwise be more likely to support tax reductions. It is difficult to imagine a better description of putting a finger on the scale: the warning exists to introduce an argument that could make voters less likely to approve the initiative.
Seen in sequence, these were not a few stray comments or merely tough questions for both sides. Judge Lanese approached the case from the premise that tax-cut initiatives are inherently one-sided, that Washington should move toward a more progressive tax system, and that voters need the government to correct their instinct to pay less. He then treated that policy preference as the neutral baseline from which the Attorney General’s PIID warning should be judged.
Protecting government spending from voters is not the court’s job, and Judge Lanese’s policy preferences cannot serve as a neutral baseline. His ruling offers yet another reason to repeal the Public Investment Impact Disclosure requirement.
