Tacoma council sends workers bill of rights to ballot. But did it miss deadline?
Pierce County's deadline to submit initiatives for this year's Nov. 4 general election was Aug. 5. By July 10 city and county officials validated a petition from a group of activists seeking to put a workers bill of rights on the ballot. The last step in the process required the city to call for an election within 30 days of the validation of the petition, but the City Council missed the deadline.
Activists with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367 and the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America have been working since February on the bill of rights, which proposes stronger protections for workers in Tacoma and a $20 minimum wage. The item has been controversial, and council signaled over the last few weeks that it was supportive of the idea behind the initiative but had concerns about the exact language and the feasibility of its implementation.
After receiving the petition, the council had 30 days to decide whether to approve the proposal outright, which would eliminate the need for an election; send the item to the ballot; or send it to the ballot while also putting forward an alternate proposal.
The council met in three separate study sessions between July and August to discuss the matter and to ask the city manager and city attorney how the initiative could be implemented and enforced if approved. Ultimately, they decided against approving the initiative outright and did not put forward an alternate proposal, and instead voted in a special meeting Aug. 8 to send it to the ballot.
'I have deep concerns. I have deep concerns about the specific implications of this particular resolution. There are legal complexities and potential impacts that we do still not yet, even after 30 days, completely understand,' Mayor Victoria Woodards said at the special meeting. 'And the lack of clarity makes this a difficult path to navigate,'
Woodards and council member John Hines, who is running for mayor, were the only two to speak on the matter before the council's vote.
'What is written currently is just something I don't think I can support and I have deep concerns about potential impacts,' Hines said. 'And I wish we could have come to a place prior to this, where we could have worked together to understand some of these potential impacts, to have a broader conversation with our stakeholders, to really get at some of the nuance that exists.'
The council received 45 pages of written public comment on the matter with a mix of opinions -- from business owners who expressed concerns about the potential for a wage increase to union workers who said it would support Tacoma residents who live paycheck to paycheck.
Since the city missed the deadline to put the initiative on the ballot in November, its next option will be to put the item forward for a special election on Feb. 10 next year, which has a submission deadline of Dec. 12, 2025. Pierce County elections manager Kyle Haugh said in order to so, the council would need to put forward another resolution that identifies Feb. 10 as the date of the special election.
'The Auditor's Office will not put anything on the ballot that the deadline has been missed for,' Pierce County elections manager Kyle Haugh told The News Tribune.
The city of Tacoma did not immediately return a request for comment about the missed deadline.
The effort to get a workers bill of rights on the ballot in Tacoma comes at the same time that a similar effort takes place in Olympia – but the Olympia city council voted to get the initiative on the ballot on July 22.
Colton Rose, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367, told The News Tribune that the union hopes it can still work with local officials to find a way to get it on the ballot this fall but said he was confident it will win whenever it does appear before the voters.
'There is sort of a thought that – did they delay the certification? Because we got the signatures in right on schedule,' UFCW 367 president Michael Hines told The News Tribune.
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