After six months of disgrace and lying low, Tim Eyman is back in the news: There’s one transportation referendum on November’s ballot (I-776), another gathering signatures (I-267), and a recent settlement of lawsuits stemming from his failure to report his past payments of a comfortable campaign salary to himself.
But with all that, Eyman’s public appearances have been carefully scripted affairs: press conferences, e-mailed statements, and occasional appearances on the largely friendly right-wing airwaves of KVI. In six months, Eyman has not given a lengthy local interview with an impartial—let alone hostile—journalist.
Until he talked recently for two hours— on the record.
Seattle Weekly: You’ve settled with the state, you’ve paid more in fines than most people put down for a down payment on a house, a staggering amount. Why shouldn’t that banish you to the political sidelines forever?
Tim Eyman: It’s absolute complete stupidity to hide the fact that I couldn’t work for free, but if we banned everybody who did stupid things from political life we wouldn’t have anyone left to do political work.
But does it discredit your initiatives? Does your admission that you weren’t up front about how you handled your contributors’ money mean that you were doing exactly the sorts of unaccountable or misleading things you rail about government doing with taxpayers’ money?
All voters can separate Tim’s soap opera from Tim’s ideas and can make individual judgment for each of those.
For a week or two after the “scandal,” I basically shut myself off from the press; I kind of crawled up into a fetal position. There was that time of introspection, where I sat back and said, “How bad is this thing?” And then, as I recovered and tried to put it all together, I started hearing from supporters.
The reaction was phenomenal. It was universal that the movement must continue. There were lots of voices of, “You really pissed me off, you’re a fricking moron, you are really stupid.” But there was never any doubt as to the movement itself.
So why come back into the public eye?
I know for certain that every person that walks into the ballot booth will vote based on the issue itself and based on no other factor whatsoever. There will be a Pavlovian response to the idea.
The bottom line is that unless you can get attention for your ideas, it doesn’t matter how good they are—they’re never going to happen. Say what you will about what an idiot I was in the past—it’s getting a whole lot of attention for our initiatives. The question is, is there such a thing as bad publicity when it comes to your initiatives?
Your initiatives in the past have primarily dealt with revenues. Now you’re getting into issues of how government spends the money, and you’re also getting into transportation issues. Why should voters listen to Tim Eyman on spending issues, and why should they listen to you on transportation?
We wanted to give the voters an alternative to Referendum 51 (R-51), the biggest tax increase in Washington state history. We fashioned the proposal around the idea of using existing public resources more cost-effectively. We do that by opening up car-pool lanes to all traffic during off-peak hours, requiring performance audits [to] be conducted on all transportation agencies, especially Sound Transit, and requiring vehicle sales taxes [to] be spent to fix our transportation infrastructure.
The initiative simply says the sales taxes that you generate when you buy a vehicle will be deposited into what’s called a Motor Vehicle Fund, which is the main road fund for the state.
Once it’s in that fund, it’s automatically distributed to the state and local levels. What they end up doing with the money is going to be their call.
But doesn’t that come at the expense of public transit and other non-auto centered solutions?
The voters have shown pretty consistently that if you make the case that the benefits outweigh the cost, the voters are willing to vote for it.
What we saw happening was the political debate centering around, “You’re against transportation improvements unless you’re in favor of Referendum 51.” Now, there’s a heck of a lot of people that can say, “I want transportation improved. I just don’t like the package you’ve put together.” We wanted to put a proposal on the table. The beauty of the initiative process is that it shatters that monopoly.
Do you think that policymakers don’t trust the public?
That’s a laugh line, isn’t it? No kidding! They know they are more likely to get taxes increased if they unilaterally do it themselves rather than going to the voters. So they think that the problem with R-51 is that they actually gave the voters a chance to say yes or no to it. “What we should have done was stiff-armed the voters and simply jammed the thing through here in Olympia regardless of public opinion, because our definition of leadership is doing things that voters don’t want. That’s our idea of leadership.”
And I’m like, leadership in dictatorships probably works pretty well. Those guys are real strong leaders. But, by and large, you do have to, in a representative democracy, represent what the voters are trying to tell you. With our initiatives, the voters have sent a pretty consistent theme of: exhaust all other options before a tax increase is even considered.
Why try to overturn past votes on Sound Transit?
With Sound Transit, you voted for red, and you’re getting blue. This is a radically different proposal than what voters were promised back in 1996. They basically said: blank check, we got the money, we’re going to go forward with pretty much whatever we want regardless of whether or not public opinion and public support is plummeting on this project.
What voters voted for in 1996 is not even remotely close to what’s being delivered now. Sound Transit says they don’t have enough money now to complete the project. They’re eventually going to have to come back to [the voters] anyway. The question is, do we want to have a revote on light rail before we start construction, or is it better to bury our state in debt and plow up neighborhoods, and when you’re halfway done say, “We’ve just scarred the landscape, do you want to finish this thing, or do you just want to leave this gaping hole in the middle of Rainier Valley?”
Are there elected officials that you admire?
Rob McKenna is a real heroic guy. The Maggie Fimias of the world. It’s the people that tweak people in their own party. You’ve got to admire that, because you know how much personal pressure that they’re under to toe the line. It’s less important what party affiliation you are than how do you react to the initiative process. It’s those particular elected officials I admire the most, because they realize that they don’t have all the answers. They realize that, “I know that this is a problem we haven’t addressed for 20 or 30 years. We’ve tried and tried, but it just can’t seem to get through the molasses that is the legislative process. It takes, once in a while, a bomb thrower to simply get out there and break through that Gordian knot, and say, ‘Let’s just go ahead and go forward with this.'”
After five or six years, how much of an outsider are you?
This outsider/insider stuff works well when you’re trying to run for elected office. When it comes to initiatives, I just don’t think it’s relevant information. Your opinions when it comes to ideas really don’t change dramatically from year to year.
Now that Permanent Offense is branching out from simply tax reduction into some specific policy areas as well, what do you want to be doing in five years politically?
The philosophy of Permanent Offense is, you should send the same message year after year after year. So far, we’ve been pretty good at speaking for the average taxpayer in the political debate. If suddenly we just start going off into la-la land, if the voters end up saying “No, that’s a stupid idea,” does that necessarily kill the movement or is it just that we got it wrong?
If the voters think that this is a better solution, they’ll vote for it. If they think it’s a stupid idea, they’ll vote it down. The idea of giving voters an additional option is something voters really appreciate.
Do you personally want to keep doing it?
As long as I’m out there swinging the bat and fighting the forces of evil and making the argument from the taxpayers’ perspective, I think the positives far outweigh the negatives when it comes to the initiatives that we’re promoting. So far, the people that really make this stuff happen—the donors and the signature gatherers and that kind of stuff—they kind of like me in the fight, they like me in the mix. Even now, the feedback I get is, “Gosh darn it, I sure like that Tim Eyman a helluva lot better than the bawling boob I saw back in February.” So, as a result, you kind of say to yourself, “These kind of people stuck by the cause during pretty tough times.” What does it say to those people for you to say, “You know what? It was fun for a while, but it’s not fun anymore, I’m not going to do it.”
Is it fun?
It’s enormously fun. There is nothing about it that is unfun.
