VICTORY! Judge delivers thorough ruling finding BIAW and Brian Heywood's Initiative 2066 unconstitutional in its entiret
The lone Brian Heywood-backed initiative to make it past voters last November violates the Washington State Constitution in several different ways and is therefore unenforceable in its entirety, King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widlan determined today.
Widlan delivered her verdict from the bench at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center following an afternoon hearing at which lawyers for the nonprofit and local government coalition working to overturn the measure faced off with attorneys for the State of Washington and Building Industry Association of Washington trying to save it.
For the time being, the ruling puts the kibosh on Initiative 2066, a scheme that seeks to keep Washington’s homes and businesses indefinitely tied to methane gas, a dirty and dangerous fossil fuel that is worsening our climate crisis. NPI made defeating I‑2066 a top priority in the recent 2024 presidential election. Though we fell short of victory at the ballot, our coalition has now carried on the fight in the courts.
And today, we won a big initial victory.
https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/03/victory-judge-delivers-thorough-ruling-finding-biaw-and-brian-heywoods-initiative-2066-unconstitutional-in-its-entirety.html
King County judge strikes down hotly debated natural gas initiative
A King County Superior Judge struck down I-2066, an initiative on natural gas, Friday, according to nonprofit Climate Solutions.
Initiative 2066, backed by the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), aims to repeal parts of a state law that accelerates Puget Sound Energy’s shift away from natural gas. (A PDF of Initiative 2066 can be seen here.) It was one of four initiatives on November’s general election ballot, and it was the only one to pass — by about 3.4%.
On Friday, King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widlan ruled that I-2066 violates the Washington state constitution — agreeing with the group of public interest advocates and local governments, led by Climate Solutions, who sued the State of Washington. The group claimed the initiative makes broad-sweeping impacts, hidden in what was supposed to be a single subject.
“I-2066’s most obvious constitutional infirmity is that it combines one seemingly popular subject (i.e., requiring certain utilities and local governments to provide natural gas to customers) with a host of separate subjects, including altering how the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (“UTC”) sets utility rates, limiting the authority of county-level agencies to regulate air pollutants, and purportedly rolling back state and local energy efficiency standards in new building construction,” Climate Solutions wrote in its motion for summary judgment. “By joining all of these distinct policy choices and requiring voters to enact all or none of them, I-2066 violates the Constitution’s prohibition on logrolling.”
https://mynorthwest.com/mynorthwest-politics/natural-gas-initiative/4066216