A look at the 2024 election through a small business lens

When lawmakers reconvene in Olympia in January, there will likely be dozens of new faces in Washington’s state legislature. All 98 House seats and roughly half the Senate seats are on the ballot this November.

Among the candidates: a Democrat and Republican running in Pierce County – both small business owners.

How does this shape the perspective they plan to bring to the Capitol if they are elected? And why are small business interest groups taking different sides on a certain ballot initiative?

‘A scalpel rather than a butcher knife’

Cam Severns is an insurance agent by trade. A couple years ago, he bought the company he was working for. He and his wife also got into the real estate business too. This year he’s added another role: candidate for the Washington state House of Representatives.

“I have my own business to run, and I do this full time as well,” Severns said. “So it’s almost a 16 hour a day job, right?”

Severns is a Democrat running in the Puyallup-area House District 25. The small operations he runs are part of a larger economic engine throughout the state. Small businesses, those with fewer than 500 employees, make up 99.5% of Washington companies and employ 49% of the population.

“Small business owners are integrated in every aspect of our society, right? From your coffee shop – if it’s obviously not Starbucks – but your coffee shop, you might go to the farmers market on a Saturday – all of those folks are small business owners,” Severns said.

Severns said he wants lawmakers to understand that there’s a big difference between a company with 500 employees and one with only a handful, like his insurance company

“When we burden small businesses with regulations that big businesses have no problem meeting, we effectively put those small businesses out there – they’re not going to make it,” Severns said.

“So I’m a big fan of carve outs. ‘Hey, you got 500 employees and I have five. I don’t need the same regulation, right?’ I think as legislators we can legislate with a scalpel rather than a butcher knife.”

As Severns talks with voters he’s hearing a lot of people talk about the high cost of living in the Northwest.

“Housing affordability is what I’m hearing a ton of,” Severns said. “You know, ‘we make a lot of money, or we’re two professionals, and we make a lot of money. We don’t even know if we’ll be able to buy a home.’”

‘What actually drives of our economy’

Another state house candidate in Pierce County is Mark Herr, a Republican running in House District 28. After serving for 18 years in the Army, a friend sold him a carpet cleaning van. That led to him acquiring three additional businesses in Olympia and Tacoma.

“I believe that small businesses are what actually drives our economy at the local level, and kind of ripples out from there,” Herr said.

Like Severns, Herr is hearing concerns from voters about how difficult it is to be able to afford housing and food and other issues that will take money to address.

“We have the cost of fuel and groceries, and then we have the fentanyl crisis and other drug related issues that are out there, and addiction” Herr said. “And so there is no one problem for us to solve. The way that we live our lives today is influenced by all of these things.

“And the thing about these problems,” Herr continued. “Is that they do not see how much money you make or how prestigious your job title is. They attack the soul.”

‘People are feeling it at home’

One law passed by the legislature is 2021 that is being blamed for raising the cost of fuel, and is in the cross hairs of small business lobbying groups, is the Climate Commitment Act.

The legislation requires major polluters like fuel suppliers to pay to release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere – generating more than a billion dollars to invest in clean infrastructure.

Initiative 2117 on the November ballot seeks to repeal the act.

One of the initiative’s backers is the National Federation of Independent Business. Patrick Connor is the organization’s Washington director.

“By and large, people are feeling it at home in their wallets every time they fill up their gas tank, every time they buy a bag of groceries, every time they decide not to go out to eat at a restaurant because things have just gotten too expensive,” Connor said.

Some analysts say it’s the companies being taxed by the Climate Commitment Act that are passing the costs to consumers. Although, just how much is unclear.

But not all organizations representing the interests of small businesses are in agreement about I-2117.

Amy Drayer runs a political arm of the Vashon Chamber of Commerce, a booster for small businesses on the island. Islanders for Ferry Action is advocating for investments in Washington’s ferries system – something that’s crucial to Vashon’s economy.

“A lot of distributors won’t come to Vashon anymore because they can’t afford to have their drivers sitting on the docks,” Drayer said.

There’s already tens of millions of dollars set aside from the Climate Commitment Act to modernize the ferry system. Drayer said rolling it back would be a major setback in the process of modernizing the ferries. And for the businesses her organization represents, it could mean the difference between staying afloat or closing up shop.

“There are bids out for these new boats. We are all the way down the line. The schematics have been done, right? So if we go back to the drawing board now, we’re only going to be delayed,” Drayer said. “When you’ve already been struggling for four years under the economic consequences of the ferry crisis, delaying another couple of years, even, is just unacceptable.”

If voters do pass Initiative 2117, backers say it could provide some relief for small business owners and everyone else. But the next legislature will still be faced with finding the funding to solve a host of long-term, and expensive, challenges facing the state.