Tim Eyman
Timothy Donald "Tim" Eyman is an anti-tax activist, businessman and Republican gubernatorial candidate from Washington. Eyman has been variously described as a populist and conservative.
Born in Yakima, Washington, Eyman graduated from Washington State University and later established a mail order business serving fraternities and sororities.
Since 1997, Eyman has been the sponsor of a number of statewide ballot measures in Washington. His most prominent of these are part of “a 20 year tug-of-war" with the state over lowering motor vehicle excise taxes, or "car tabs", under the slogan “$30 Tabs”, of which 2019's Initiative 976 is the most recent. Initiative 976 passed with 53% of the vote and has so far withstood a challenge by local governments. Like Eyman's 1999 Initiative 695 on the same topic, Initiative 976 is currently being reviewed by the Washington Supreme Court, but the current Governor of Washington declined to let it become law as the governor in 2000 did.
In November 2019, Eyman declared his intention to run as a Republican in the 2020 Washington gubernatorial election. During Governor Jay Inslee's 2020 shutdown of the state, Eyman used his campaign to challenge Inslee over numerous aspects of his restrictions and proclamations from his COVID-19 response, including distinguishing between “essential” and “non-essential” businesses and workers, the closure of schools and the requirement to wear masks.
Over the course of his twenty-two career as a policy advocate, Eyman has become the most prolific sponsor of Washington ballot measures in its history, having qualified seventeen statewide initiatives, won voter approval in eleven campaigns, the result being several significant policy changes that withstood court challenges and became law.
Early life and education
Timothy Donald Eyman was born in Yakima, Washington and adopted shortly after birth. He graduated from Yakima's West Valley High School and went on to attend Washington State University on an academic scholarship, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1988 in business management. At WSU, he was initiated into Delta Tau Delta and competed on the university's intercollegiate wrestling team, finishing third in the Pacific-10 Conference.Career
Mail order business
After graduating from WSU, Eyman began a mail order business out of his home selling engraved wristwatches to members of Greek Letter Organizations.Entry into politics
In 1995, while living in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood, a King County tax proposal before voters sought to raise $250 million for a new Seattle Mariners stadium. Eyman attended a public meeting where a Seattle radio host, Dave Ross, was speaking. There Eyman decided to help gather signatures at Green Lake while holding a cardboard sign reading, “Let the voters decide”, and gathered 100 signatures his first day.Voters ended up rejecting the tax package. Mariners' owner Nintendo of America insisted the city provide the $250 million funding, or the team would be sold. In an emergency session, Governor Mike Lowry and the legislature authorized King County to levy stadium bond taxes, which ended up being placed on restaurants and car rentals. Despite opposition from voters, the stadium now called T-Mobile Park was built and new taxes were imposed.
This experience drew Eyman into politics, and he often describes it as his “baptism of fire.” As he saw it, “They overruled what the voters did.” In 1997, Eyman sponsored his first ballot measure, Initiative 200, a Washington spin-off of California’s Proposition 209, which passed in 1996. Ward Connerly, an African-American businessman and Proposition 209's sponsor, would become Eyman’s hero and inspiration for his own initiative activism. Initiative 200 was approved by voters in 1998, winning 58.2% of the vote.
Initiative 695 and ''$30 Car Tabs'' origin
Inspired by the 1998 "No Car Tax" campaign slogan of Virginia's then future governor, Jim Gilmore, Eyman sponsored Initiative 695 in 1999. It was an Initiative to the People to lower the fee for "car tabs" in the state of Washington to a flat fee of $30.Eyman's effort to circulate petitions and gather signatures resulted in 514,141 signatures total. Despite a broad institutional consensus in opposition – including "politicians, governments, the media, business big and small, environmentalists, civic groups, and labor" – voters approved the initiative with 56.16% of the vote, garnering nearly one million votes. Prior to the passage of Initiative 695, car tab fees were 2.2% of the value of the vehicle.
Initiative 695 not only cut car tabs to $30, but also require voter approval of all proposed taxes at the state or local level. After its passage, the initiative was immediately challenged by opponents, citing its effect on government budgets and its violation of a single-subject rule for initiatives. The Washington Supreme Court struck the provision for voter approval of taxes, but allowed the car tab cuts to remain.
While the court considered the constitutionality of the main provision, Democratic Governor Gary Locke called a special session of the legislature to pass the $30 car tab flat fee provision into law, lay out budget cuts to account for the tax reduction, and Attorney General Gregoire defended it before the court. Despite "Microsoft, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, labor, and virtually every editorial page in the state opposing I-695", and more than $2.1 million spent in the campaign against it, the $30 car tab fee was formally signed into law on March 30 after a positive ruling by the courts.
An January 2001 assessment by the conservative Washington Policy Center of the measure's effect claimed a net savings of $750 million in the first year, and twenty-one predictions made by opponents had not materialized. Eyman's work on Initiative 695 in 2000 was recognized by the Conservative Political Action Conference with its Ronald Reagan Award.
Permanent Offense
Following the success of that measure, Eyman established a political action committee called Permanent Offense to campaign for other anti-tax initiatives. In 2000 he began taking a salary as head of Permanent Offense, receiving $45,000 that year. According to Eyman, his decision to begin paying himself was due to the time he had invested into campaigning that had resulted in a loss of income from his watch business. He has since been described as a "professional initiative filer".Eyman has been the primary sponsor of ballot initiatives concerning taxes and transportation almost every year since the passage of Initiative 695. Of seventeen initiatives that qualified for the ballot, eleven were passed by vote, however, a majority of those were subsequently overturned or partially invalidated in subsequent court action.
2020 Candidacy for Governor
On November 21, 2019, Eyman announced that he is running for Governor of Washington in 2020, while making a public comment at a Sound Transit meeting. He formally entered the race as a Republican in a speech in his hometown Yakima, where he laid out his intention to run an aggressive campaign against Inslee, ignore his primary opponents, focus on conservative issues, and embrace the perceived similarities between him and President Donald Trump in terms of style, attitude and ability to weather attacks from the Left.After Washington Governor Jay Inslee ordered a statewide ban on gatherings of more than 250 people to prevent spread of COVID-19, Eyman promoted a public event for which he set a goal of 251 attendees.
Political views
Eyman has previously described himself as an "independent Republican", also noting that he is an admirer of Ralph Nader and Rob McKenna. He has been variously described by others as a "populist" and a "libertarian". Knute Berger once called him "a political player on a par with Governor Christine Gregoire and House Speaker Frank Chopp" and "the most influential conservative in the state".In a 2006 interview with the Seattle Weekly, Eyman said "...there are Democrats and Republicans that really respect the initiative process. It’s those particular elected officials I admire the most, because they realize that they don’t have all the answers". As of 2019, according to Eyman, he had no formal party affiliation and was "equally frustrated by Republicans and Democrats at times". Writing in 2005, David S. Broder described Eyman as "a personable young man".
Political Activities after 1999
2002
With Governor Locke's $30 car tab law expiring, Eyman sponsored Initiiative 776. It was a re-boot of Initiative 695 and continued the theme of $30 Car Tabs. It passed with 51.47%, gaining just over 900,000 votes.2005
Frustrated by the passage of tax increases from Governor Gregoire despite promises not to raise them, Eyman introduced Initiative 900 to increase the power of the Washington State Auditor to conduct performance audits. The initiative was approved by the voters by 56.4% and garnered nearly one million votes. By 2009, Democratic Washington State Auditor Brian Sonntag had identified $3.8 billion in savings and potential saving to the taxpayers because of the implementation of a state law implementing performance audits as well as Initiative 900.2006
On January 30, Eyman filed an initiative and a referendum, both intended to repeal a measure which added sexual orientation to the list of categories against which discrimination in housing, lending, and employment is banned in the state of Washington. In addition to seeking to remove "sexual orientation" from the law, Eyman pushed an initiative that would prohibit state government from requiring quotas or other preferential treatment for any person or group "based on sexual orientation or sexual preference". Eyman had announced he would be turning in the signatures for the gay-rights referendum on June 5. Instead, he showed up at the State Capitol dressed as Darth Vader and then announced he would turn in petitions the next day, at the deadline. He reportedly wasn't carrying any of the signatures, but instead was carrying signed petitions for another car-tab measure unrelated to the referendum. The next day, June 6, Eyman announced he had fallen more than 7,000 signatures short of the 112,440 required to get the measure placed on the November ballot. The state law that he had attempted to put to a public vote took effect on the same day.On January 9, Eyman filed an initiative to cap motor vehicle registration charges at $30 per year and repeal taxes and fees exceeding the $30 limit. On June 29, Eyman submitted 14,270 pages of signatures for this initiative to the Secretary of State's office. On July 7, Eyman submitted an additional 2,716 pages. While at the front desk, and prior to the counting of any signatures, Eyman requested that the receptionist date stamp a piece of note pad with the number 300,353 on it.
On July 23 Eyman charged the Secretary of State's office with "... gross incompetence, purposeful sabotage, or blatant dishonesty" for the discrepancy of 34,347 signatures. Along with the "receipt" with the number 300,353, Eyman claimed to have kept weekly logs of the number of signatures collected, and wrote the weight of each box of petitions on the boxes themselves. The Secretary of State's office could not provide the boxes, as they were recycled upon the cataloging of the signatures. It also denied the credibility of Eyman's receipt, noting that official counting had not even begun at that point, and calling attention to their own official receipts. Eyman has been completely unable to substantiate his claim of submitting 300,353 signatures, as he claims to have not made copies of the petitions. On July 28, the Secretary of State's office announced that it had conducted a random sample test of 4% of the signatures, finding an invalidation rate of 17.96%. Based upon this number, the initiative failed to make the ballot. A full check of all signatures collected confirmed this conclusion.
In August 2006 a Thurston County judge blocked a tongue-in-cheek initiative proposed by Seattle-area computer programmer and blogger David Goldstein that would have allowed voters to criticize – or support – Tim Eyman by declaring, "The citizens of the state of Washington do hereby proclaim that Tim Eyman is a horse's ass."
2007
In 2007, Eyman spearheaded Initiative 960, intending to make it harder for the Legislature to raise taxes and fees. The legislature repealed it in 2010.2008
In 2008, Eyman sponsored I-985, which had the purpose to reduce traffic congestion through various means including:- Opening HOV/carpool lanes to all vehicles during non-peak hours, where "non-peak" is defined as any time outside of 6-9am and 3-6pm on Mondays through Fridays.
- Requiring local governments to synchronize traffic lights on heavily-traveled arterials and streets.
- Clearing out accidents faster with expanded emergency roadside assistance, which would be funded by vehicle sales tax revenues.
- Restricting toll usage such that they can only be used on the freeway or bridge being tolled, with any surplus revenue to be redirected to other congestion relief efforts in the state.
Critics argued that opening HOV lanes to more cars would not reduce congestion, due to induced demand, and in fact would likely cause worse congestion since rush-hour traffic typically lasts longer than 3 hours each morning and night during weekdays. I-985 would also have stalled funding for the replacement of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, since the bridge's construction is currently dependent on tolls that will come from both the current bridge and the I-90 floating bridge. Since both bridges cross Lake Washington, requiring tolls on only one bridge would serve only to push traffic to the other. The initiative also directed no funding toward mass transit, counteracting the desired goals of the revised Proposition 1, which sought funding for expansion of light rail, commuter trains, and bus service in the Puget Sound region. Proponents of I-985 pointed out that highways I-405 and SR 167 have opened their HOV lanes during non peak hours without any noticeable problems.
The initiative was defeated 60% to 40% with only one of the state's 39 counties approving the initiative.
2009
In 2009, Eyman sponsored I-1033, which would apply a cap on revenue tied to the consumer price index and population. The bill is similar to TABOR which was enacted in 1992, and then placed on a five-year timeout in 2005 by referendum, in Colorado. The initiative was rejected by voters.2012
Eyman sponsored 25 initiatives for 2012, of which only Initiative 1185 made it onto the November general ballot. It passed with 63.91% of the vote. Approximately 95% of the money to support the initiative was reportedly from "corporate behemoths such as oil companies... the national beer and soda-pop industries and big pharmaceutical firms."2013
Eyman filed Initiative 517 on April 15, 2012, to "set penalties for interfering with signature-gatherers or signers." It was referred to 2013 session of legislature, which declined to pass it, sending it to the general election for November 5, 2013. Among those opposing I-517 were former Republican Attorney General of Washington, Rob McKenna, publishing on smartergovernmentwa.org:I-517 was also opposed by The Seattle Times, The Columbian newspaper, The Wenatchee World, The Everett Herald, The Olympian, Washington Research Council, The News Tribune, Northwest Progressive Institute, Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Sounders FC, Washington State Democratic Party and many local Democratic organizations.
The initiative lost by a margin of 63%-37%.
2018
On March 15, 2018, Eyman introduced two referendum measures with the intent to put all or portions of a recently passed law EHB2957 that effectively phases out non-native finfish aquaculture to a public vote. Eyman withdrew both referendum measures after Cooke Aquaculture, the only company farming nonnative Atlantic salmon in Washington, made it clear they did not want to be associated with his referendum campaign.From Joel Richardson, Vice President of Public Affairs for Cooke Aquaculture, on the company's involvement with the campaign--
2019
On 21 November 2019, Eyman announced that he is running for Governor of Washington in 2020, while making a public comment at a Sound Transit meeting.Initiatives and outcomes
Personal life
As of 2019, Eyman lives in Mukilteo, Washington.Divorced from his wife, the couple are the adoptive parents of three children. In 2018, the strain from escalating litigation led to Eyman filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and contributed to his divorce.
Controversies
Settlement with Attorney General
In February 2002 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Eyman paid himself $165,000 from campaign donations, while claiming to be working for free.Eyman initially denied receiving payments, but later admitted wrongdoing.
The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, the state equivalent of the Federal Elections Commission charged Eyman with diverting $233,000 from his initiative campaigns.
and Eyman eventually settled with the Washington State Attorney General's office, paying $50,000 and accepting a lifetime ban on involvement in any political committee's financial accounts.
Since the settlement, Eyman's co-sponsors and chairmen in his Permanent Offense political committee became more actively involved; Monte Benham of Kennewick became the head of Permanent Offense, though Eyman remained involved politically.
Campaign reporting omissions
In March 2017, The Washington State Attorney General sued Eyman for $2.1M accusing Eyman of enriching himself with money donated to initiative campaigns.The lawsuit stems from a 2015 investigation by the Public Disclosure Commission into Eyman's use of donations to different initiative campaigns.
In February 2020, Eyman was found to have been in violation of Washington campaign finance laws for at least the last seven years, concealing nearly $800,000 in political contributions.