Harger: Nearly 2 million voted to protect natural gas. Four topics on one page killed it
Sep 22, 2026, 6:49 AM | Updated: 3:06 pm
Nearly 2 million Washingtonians voted to protect natural gas in 2024 with Initiative 2066, and last Thursday the Washington State Supreme Court struck it down.
If you’ve got a natural gas range in your kitchen this morning, nothing that happened in Olympia changes that. You can still buy one. You can still swap out the furnace when it quits on you in January.
But if you figure somebody’s coming for your gas eventually, you’re not paranoid. It’s just going to be slower and quieter than a ban.
Three things died with that initiative.
Energy companies had to serve you natural gas even when electricity was available. That guarantee’s gone.
Regulators couldn’t approve rate plans that push people off gas. Now they can, and rate plans are where your monthly bill actually gets decided.
And your city council couldn’t write rules penalizing gas. Now it can. Seattle already has a law requiring big commercial and apartment buildings to hit net-zero emissions somewhere between 2041 and 2050. Your house isn’t in that. Your landlord’s building is, and so is the place you work.
Nobody’s taking your stove. They’re just making it more expensive to keep, one decision at a time, and none of those decisions will have the word “ban” anywhere in it.
Most of the people who voted yes knew exactly what they wanted, and it wasn’t complicated. If you want gas, you should be able to get gas. They felt nobody should have an electric contraption thrust upon them because a state agency decided it knows your kitchen better than you do.
The Washington Supreme Court found four subjects inside one initiative
So why did the court toss it? Too many topics.
Six of the nine justices found four separate subjects packed into one 21-page measure. Making utilities serve anybody who asks. Tying the hands of local clean air agencies. Rewriting the building codes. And amending the Decarbonization Act, the 2024 law shoving Puget Sound Energy off gas.
Chief Justice Debra Stephens wrote that you couldn’t pull those subjects apart from each other, so the whole thing came down together. The Constitution says one bill, one subject, and that’s been the rule since statehood in 1889.
Three justices disagreed. Sal Mungia wrote the court could’ve saved most of it. If I were on that court, that’s probably where I’d have landed. I’m not on that court.
Washington’s single-subject rule lets Olympia pass 121-page omnibus bills
Olympia passes bills touching 30 or 40 unrelated laws every single session and gets away with it, because of the title. Slap “an act relating to transportation” on the front, and that wide-open word, transportation, buys you room to stuff anything in there. Last year the Court of Appeals upheld a 121-page transportation bill on exactly that reasoning.
An initiative campaign doesn’t get that. It gets a ballot title written to sell, so it comes out short and punchy. “Protect energy choice.” “$30 car tabs.” Once you’ve hung a sign that specific on the door, everything inside has to fit under it.
Think of it like a moving box. The Legislature labels the box “kitchen” and fills it with whatever gadgets and utensils are in your kitchen. A campaign labels its box “coffee mugs,” and then a judge opens it up and finds the toaster.
Does that make sense to me? Not really. But the court’s said the same thing for 26 years. You can’t have multiple subjects in an initiative. Listen to them when they say it, because it doesn’t sound like they’re changing their minds.
Tim Eyman hit this wall twice. Brian Heywood just hit it once
Tim Eyman’s $30 car tabs, Initiative 695, died this way back in 2000. It repealed the car tab tax and also required a public vote on every future tax increase, which the court called two subjects, not one. Eyman’s second run at $30 car tabs, I-976, died the same way in 2020, and that one was unanimous. The court said the ballot title promised limits on car taxes and fees, and ordering Sound Transit to retire its bonds was a whole second subject riding along underneath.
Eyman hit that wall twice. Now Heywood’s hit it once. Nobody gets to act surprised.
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Your Puget Sound Energy gas bill already carries a Climate Commitment Act charge
And your bill’s going up. Not someday.
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) gas customers have been paying a Climate Commitment Act charge since October of 2023. Electric customers started paying theirs in August of 2025. PSE asked regulators for a 20% bump on residential gas over two years, and the reason the company gave is the whole story right there. As people leave the gas system, whoever’s left splits the cost of keeping it running.
How to write a natural gas initiative that survives the Washington Supreme Court
So if they really want to undo the Decarbonization Act, write four initiatives.
Not one big measure that saves natural gas forever. Four separate initiatives, each doing one of the things the court just listed off, each on its own clipboard outside the Fred Meyer. Yeah, it’s onerous. Yeah, it costs more. Your consultants will hate you, because four boring initiatives don’t sell like one exciting one. That’s a branding problem, not an impossible one.
And a modest suggestion. Buy lots of advertising time on “Seattle’s Morning News” to walk people through your “four easy pieces to protect natural gas.” There’s your branding. Right there.
Oh, and if you hate gas and want all of us on induction ranges by 2040, you should also, and this is important, buy lots of advertising on Seattle’s Morning News to explain why people ought to vote down each one of the four initiatives.
Ooh. We could settle it live in studio. Chili cookoff. Heywood and his crew on a gas burner, team Inslee on one of those induction jobs with the doohickey that boils water before you’ve finished chopping the onion. Loser buys the cornbread. Good cornbread, not the dry stuff. Honey. Whipped butter. And I can smell that chili now. The shows using the studio later in the day may not be happy, but we got two batches of chili bright and early. I like beans in mine. I bet Inslee makes his that way, but Heywood is all like, no, that’s not how “real” chili is made.
Sorry, I got a little distracted thinking about chili. But making chili can be messy. Making an initiative doesn’t have to be.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
