Nothing interesting on the agenda this week (good lord, could they cram any more public works crap into one week?), so, I'm going to write about public financing of campaigns.

Public financing was legal in Washington as a local option until the early 90s when seemingly by mistake, it was written off the books by the initiative that created the Public Disclosure Commission. Seattle had a pretty robust program at the time.

The short of it is that public financing puts candidates on equal footing, regardless of their ability to raise large sums of money. More information here, here and here.

Anyway, it looks like the local option is back on the table, with the passage of SB 5278 onto the governor. This will allow local governments, through initiative, to create public financing programs.

So, who wants to get an initiative campaign going in Olympia?

Here is a short list of needs for a campaign:

• You need 15 percent of registered voters to send an initiative to the polls in Olympia. Close as I can figure (based on turnout and number of votes in the last city election) that's about 1,900 people. We'd need to double check that.
• No limit on petition size in this case, so we can do 8.5 x 11. Unlike initiatives to the state (which have to be much larger), petitions could be easily distributed over the internet. People could print them out, get their friends to sign and turn them in.
• The next step, I guess, is to look up ballot language. The old ordinance in Seattle might work, I guess. Here it is. Anyone have experience writing city code?

I've also set up a wiki that anyone can edit to help work on the above tasks here if anyone's interested.