Two Lawsuits, One Sentence: The Fight Over How WA Describes Its Income Tax Repeal

Two lawsuits filed within days of each other are now fighting over a single sentence: how Washington describes what happens to state spending if voters repeal the state's new tax on income above $1 million. A Thurston County Superior Court hearing is set for Aug. 7, giving a judge less than three months before the Nov. 3 election to decide whether that sentence appears on ballots at all. The fight pits an open-government advocate who helped gather signatures for the repeal against the very Attorney General's office whose job is to describe what the measure does, and, separately, pits the repeal campaign itself against the state over whether that description is even accurate.

At stake is Initiative 645, which would undo Senate Bill 6346, the 9.9% tax the Legislature imposed this year on household income exceeding $1 million. Gov. Bob Ferguson signed that bill into law on March 30, 2026. Backers of the repeal, organized as Let's Go Washington, gathered more than 500,000 signatures, well past the roughly 300,000 required, and the Secretary of State's office certified the measure for the ballot on July 16. What happens next is being decided less by voters than by a single paragraph of ballot text.

The Fifteen Words Both Sides Are Fighting Over

Washington law requires the Attorney General's office to draft a "public investment impact disclosure" for any initiative that would meaningfully change state spending, and to attach it to the ballot title voters see. For I-645, the office released that language on July 24: "This measure would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education (including universities and community colleges), and human services (primarily healthcare)." At issue, according to court filings reported by the Washington State Standard, are those roughly fifteen words describing the tax's fiscal consequences. Opponents on both sides of the underlying tax question now say the language misrepresents what the initiative actually does, though for very different reasons: one calls the entire disclosure requirement an unconstitutional add-on to the initiative process, the other calls this specific sentence factually premature.

Deputy Communications Director Mike Faulk, speaking for Attorney General Nick Brown's office, defended the statement as required, neutral disclosure rather than advocacy. "The law ensures voters receive information about initiatives they are asked to decide," Faulk said. "We look forward to defending it." The office has reason to expect a fight either way. Any statement describing a repeal's downstream effects necessarily forces a choice of baseline, and whichever baseline the state's lawyers pick, the side that stands to lose from that framing has an incentive to sue. That defense will now be tested twice over, in two lawsuits built on almost entirely different legal theories.

An Initiative Signer Turned Plaintiff

The first suit comes from an unlikely direction. Arthur West, an open-government advocate who says he personally signed and helped circulate the I-645 petition, filed suit in Thurston County Superior Court on July 27 against Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and Attorney General Brown, according to CPA Practice Advisor. West isn't challenging the tax repeal itself. He's challenging the 2022 state law that lets the Attorney General attach a funding-impact statement to an initiative's ballot title after signatures have already been gathered and certified. He argues that law is an unconstitutional infringement on the citizen initiative process itself, since voters who signed the petition never saw the disclosure language that now accompanies it to the ballot.

"I'm not doing this to derail the initiative or to promote the initiative," West said of his suit. "I'm doing this to support the people's right to petition and to adopt laws independent of the Legislature." West is seeking a court declaration that the 2022 law, signed by then-Gov. Jay Inslee and in effect since June of that year, is unconstitutional, and an order barring the impact disclosure from appearing on the November ballot at all. It is not the first time this statute has faced a court challenge. A nearly identical 2024 suit from GOP chair Jim Walsh and Mainstream Republicans of Washington, targeting fiscal statements on three other Let's Go Washington-backed measures, was dismissed on procedural grounds before reaching the merits, meaning the underlying constitutional question West is raising has still never actually been decided by a Washington court.

The Campaign That Wrote the Initiative Fights Its Own Ballot Description

The second challenge comes from Let's Go Washington itself, and it argues something narrower but more pointed: that the Attorney General's statement isn't unconstitutional, just wrong. In its filing, reported by the Yakima Herald, the campaign contends the tax revenue described in the disclosure "has not yet been collected or allocated," making it inaccurate to say repeal would "decrease" funding that does not currently exist anywhere in a state budget. Rather than seeking to strike the disclosure entirely, Let's Go Washington proposed substitute language arguing that passing I-645 would instead be tied to an increase in the 2026-2027 general fund relative to a baseline that never assumed the tax's revenue in the first place. It is an argument about framing and accounting, not constitutional law, and it is a much harder one for a judge to simply grant or deny wholesale.

Brian Heywood, the Redmond hedge fund manager who founded and bankrolls Let's Go Washington, has cast the broader repeal fight in blunter terms than his campaign's legal filings do. "This is going to hit the economy," Heywood has said of the tax. "Someone has to fight." Whether a judge treats an unallocated revenue estimate as present fact or future forecast is now a live legal question, not a talking point, and it is one that could shape how every future fiscal disclosure in Washington gets worded, well beyond this single initiative.

From the Statehouse to 511,000 Signatures

I-645's path to the ballot began in the Legislature, not at the signature table. Senate Bill 6346 passed this year's session and was signed by Ferguson on March 30, 2026, creating Washington's first tax specifically targeting income rather than property, sales, or business activity: a 9.9% levy on the portion of household income above $1 million annually. The bill drew an immediate legal challenge of its own even before Ferguson's signature dried, a sign of how contested the underlying policy has been since before I-645 ever existed. Washington has no general income tax and a state constitution that has long been read to bar one, which is part of why SB 6346 was written narrowly, as a tax on a specific high-earner slice of income rather than a broad-based levy.

Let's Go Washington began circulating repeal petitions almost immediately, submitting more than 511,000 raw signatures to the Secretary of State on July 6 against a requirement of roughly 300,000 valid ones. That was a comfortable enough margin that the office certified the initiative for the November ballot on July 16, just ten days later, without a signature-count fight. That speed is itself notable. Initiatives challenging brand-new tax law rarely clear signature review this fast, and it suggests an unusually well-funded and organized push that was ready to go the moment the bill passed, not one built from scratch afterward.

What $3 Billion a Year Actually Funds, and When

Buried in the dueling filings is a genuine point of confusion that neither side's press materials fully resolves: when does this tax actually start costing anyone money? Coverage citing the bill's fiscal note says the tax becomes effective Jan. 1, 2028, while separate reporting on its expected yield says collections "begin in 2029." Both are correct, and reconciling them explains why the fight matters right now. The tax applies to income earned starting in 2028, but because Washington taxpayers file and pay the year after they earn, the first actual dollar doesn't move until 2029 returns come due. That one-year lag is exactly why an "impact" statement about money that has not yet been assessed, let alone spent, is legally contestable in the way Let's Go Washington now argues: for all of 2026 and 2027, the "funding" the disclosure warns voters about decreasing is still, technically, zero dollars.

When collection does begin, the tax is projected to raise roughly $3 billion a year from an estimated 21,000 filers — a tiny slice of Washington households funding what backers describe as an expansion of K-12 education spending, child care and food-access programs, the state's Working Families Tax Credit, and targeted small-business tax relief. Ferguson, who has staked real political capital defending the threshold, has said he "would veto any legislative action that lowered the threshold below the million dollars," a preemptive line drawn against future legislative tinkering regardless of how the repeal vote goes. His No on 645 campaign, launched July 15 alongside organized labor, has already banked a $1 million contribution from the Service Employees International Union, a sign that unions see the tax's education and human-services carve-outs as worth defending as hard as the campaign against I-645 will need to be fought.

A Fast Clock to November

Both suits now converge on the same Aug. 7 hearing date in Thurston County, though they ask the judge for different things. West wants the entire disclosure requirement struck as unconstitutional, while Let's Go Washington wants only its specific wording rewritten before ballots print. A judge could grant one, both, or neither, or split the difference by ordering revised language without touching the underlying law, and any ruling is likely to be appealed given how little runway remains before ballots go to the printer for a Nov. 3 election. Kitsap County's own ballots, printed and mailed by the county auditor's office like every other Washington county's, will carry whatever language survives that appeal window.

What makes this fight bigger than one initiative is the precedent question sitting underneath it. Washington's public investment impact disclosure law has now drawn serious legal challenges in back-to-back election cycles, the 2024 Walsh suit and this year's pair, and both times it has come from initiative campaigns that otherwise favor cutting government, not expanding judicial review of it. If a court finds the 2022 law unconstitutional on West's process argument, every future citizen initiative in Washington loses its funding-impact disclosure, not just this one. That would mark a bigger swing in how the state's most direct form of democracy gets explained to voters than either lawsuit's short-term stakes on I-645 alone suggest.