Lance Byrd(R)

I'm running because I did not feel that my neighbors and I were being heard — or that anyone in Olympia was looking after our best interests.

Respect the Voters — No State Income Tax

Washington voters have rejected a state income tax at the ballot more than ten times.³ In 2024, more than 400,000 people signed a petition to prohibit one,³ and the legislature enacted that ban⁴ — then turned around two years later and passed an income tax anyway, sold as affecting only "millionaires" through a $1 million deduction that future legislatures can lower or eliminate at will.⁵⁶ Both of our current 23rd District House incumbents — Rep. Tarra Simmons (Position 1) and Rep. Greg Nance (Position 2) — voted for it.⁵

Washington already raises more than $72 billion every two years in state taxes without a broad income tax — roughly $36 billion a year.⁷ Here is how that two-year revenue breaks down:

That is a heavy two-year load on sales, business activity, property, and specialty taxes already embedded in the cost of living. Stacking another income tax on top is not what voters have asked for — it is time to budget responsibly with what we have.

Protecting Natural Gas Access

The same pattern repeats on natural gas. More than 546,000 voters signed petitions to qualify Initiative 2066, and voters approved it to protect affordable access in our homes and businesses.⁸⁹ Courts overturned it on a technicality,⁹ and the legislature has done nothing to restore the will of the voters.

Affordable, Reliable Energy

I understand why climate change matters to many people in our district. Concerns about warming and sea level rise weigh on families here. Younger voters worry about what the future holds. Even scientists who question alarmist scenarios — like former Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry — accept that climate is changing.¹⁰ Their argument is that expensive state policies are being rushed ahead of reliable power and honest cost-benefit analysis. Business owners tell me they want to do the right thing — but they cannot absorb endless cost hikes and still keep the doors open and people employed. Those feelings are valid. The problem is not whether Washington State should care about the environment; it is whether current state policy is striking the right balance that families and employers can actually live with. I do not believe that balance has been struck.

Rep. Tarra Simmons voted for the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) when it passed the House in 2021.¹¹ Rep. Greg Nance was appointed to the House in 2023 and did not vote on the original passage of the bill,¹² but as an incumbent he has supported keeping the Climate Commitment Act in place.¹³ CCA and the prior Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) were sold as climate progress, but on the ground they are phasing out natural gas through higher compliance costs and disincentives while pushing aggressive electrification before we have reasonable alternatives to support it. A utility-funded study presented to Washington regulators projects the Pacific Northwest could face a power-reliability gap by 2030 — a shortfall of roughly 9,000 megawatts, about 15% of projected 2030 regional need, or roughly Oregon's entire electric load — as older plants retire and demand surges.¹⁴ Solar and wind cannot reliably close that gap: they are intermittent, face massive transmission bottlenecks, and require expensive overbuilding or storage. Replacing that shortfall with utility-scale solar alone would require about 72,000 acres of panels — roughly 113 square miles at NREL's median of 8 acres per megawatt¹⁵ — with credible estimates ranging from about 70 to 140 square miles depending on site layout.¹⁵ That is land taken from farming or housing, and it still would not deliver consistent power when the sun is not shining.

We need a practical bridge to generate electricity — abundant, clean, affordable natural gas until a reliable carbon-free nuclear solution is in place, without repeating the cost overruns of the 1970s and 1980s. Washington cannot solve global emissions alone. Global Energy Monitor reports that China and India commissioned roughly 123 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity in 2024 and 2025 combined — 30.5 GW and 78.1 GW in China, plus about 14 GW in India. At a typical 50% capacity factor, that is about 538 billion kilowatt-hours of generation per year; at roughly 0.9 metric tons of CO₂ per megawatt-hour, those plants can emit on the order of 480 million metric tons of CO₂ annually once operating — equivalent to more than 55,000 Chimacum-sized ferries, each producing about 8,600 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year (the Washington State Ferries fleet averaged about 180,000 metric tons across 21 vessels in 2019).¹⁶ Only the federal government has real leverage abroad. In the meantime, state policy is squeezing the budgets of families and businesses. At the pump, the CCA's hidden gas tax is collected at the refinery and passed on to drivers — and the same refineries supply Idaho at a much lower cost. At home, Puget Sound Energy's pending three-year rate plan proposes cumulative increases of about 30% on typical residential electric bills and about 20% on natural gas through 2029, tied in part to clean-energy mandates and grid upgrades.¹⁷ The UTC must still approve those rates, and final increases may differ — but families are already feeling it. For Kitsap employers — contractors, restaurants, farms, and shops running on tight margins — higher energy costs are not an abstract climate line item. They show up in payroll, pricing, and whether a business can stay open. That is the trade-off Olympia has not been honest about: asking working families and local businesses to pay more before the system can reliably deliver cleaner power. I am not against environmental progress. I am against pricing people out of their homes, their commutes, and their livelihoods in the name of a global goal that our electrical grid is not ready to handle.

Housing Kitsap Families Can Afford

The same top-down approach shows up in housing policy. Under the Growth Management Act, Urban Growth Areas concentrate most new development on a small share of Washington's land — a constraint that puts upward pressure on land prices and housing costs.¹⁸ Across North Kitsap, homebuilding has not kept pace with demand: spillover pressure from the Puget Sound region and years of underproduction have driven up prices, and Kitsap jurisdictions were projected to need to nearly triple annual housing production to meet expected growth in communities including Poulsbo, Kingston, and Bainbridge Island.¹⁹ Working families and young people who want to stay in those towns are priced out. The Growth Management Act needs reform so local communities can build the housing workers and young families need — without state mandates that price people out.

Parental Rights in Education

The same pattern repeats on parental rights — and it is one of the main reasons I am running. More than 418,000 parents and concerned citizens signed petitions asking for the right to know what is taught in schools, review instructional materials, opt out of sexual-health education, and receive timely notice when something serious happens to their child at school.²⁰ I believe parents are the primary decision-makers for their children, not the state. The legislature adopted Initiative 2081 in 2024 — Rep. Simmons voted against it on the House floor, while Rep. Nance voted for it²¹ — after majority lawmakers said they would likely need to make changes in the future, citing confusing language that did not align with other state and federal laws.²² One year later they did exactly that, passing House Bill 1296 to rewrite the Parents' Bill of Rights.²³²⁴ Both of our current incumbents voted for that rewrite.²⁵

What Parents Won — and What Olympia Took Back

Initiative 2081 gave parents something concrete: one school request for a child's public school records — including medical and health files, mental health counseling notes, vocational counseling, discipline records, attendance, and special-education screening — with copies due within ten business days.²³²⁴ Even before adoption, federal privacy law (FERPA) already granted every public school parent baseline rights to inspect school-held education records — a floor, not a ceiling.²⁶ FERPA does not entitle parents to every document connected to their child, but it also does not stop states from going further. Initiative 2081 did exactly that — a broader set of school files on a ten-day timeline instead of FERPA's 45-day outer limit. Parents wanted more than the federal minimum, and the legislature had just adopted it.

HB 1296 sponsors called the rollback a cleanup to align Washington with federal privacy rules.²⁴ I do not accept that excuse, and the public record does not support it. A lawsuit challenged Initiative 2081 on state constitutional grounds — not as a direct FERPA violation. In June 2024, a King County judge briefly blocked the medical-records and ten-day provisions, citing tension with FERPA's 45-day ceiling;²⁷ in January 2025, the same court dissolved that injunction, dismissed the challenge, and allowed the full initiative to take effect — with no final ruling that it violated federal law.²⁸ Four months after courts cleared the initiative, the legislature passed HB 1296 anyway and rolled parent access back to that federal baseline. That was a choice made in Olympia, not a requirement imposed from Washington, D.C.

Here is what that choice means for families. Under HB 1296, parents may request only "education records" — attendance, grades, test results, disciplinary status, IEPs, and similar cumulative-folder material — and schools may take up to 45 days to respond.²³²⁹²⁶ Medical and health records, mental health counseling notes, vocational counseling records, and a counselor's personal notes kept in sole possession are no longer guaranteed through a single school request.²³²⁹²⁶ Lawmakers pointed to chapter 70.02 RCW as an alternate path — which HB 1296 explicitly left unchanged²⁹ — but that is not the same thing parents had under the initiative. A parent must identify and contact each outside provider separately, wait 15 to 21 working days for a response,³⁰ and still may not get school counseling notes held by the district.²⁹ For adolescents 13 and older who have consented to their own mental health care, outside providers may refuse disclosure altogether — with no deadline and no guarantee of access.³¹³²

On school-provided health care, sponsors said existing state and federal laws still protect relevant rights while honoring student privacy.²⁴ What HB 1296 actually did was delete three Initiative 2081 notification rules: advance notice before the school offers or arranges medical services (with emergency exceptions), notice when a school service could affect family insurance copays, and notice when arranged treatment requires follow-up care beyond school hours — such as monitoring pain, medications, crutches, or emotional support during recovery.^23292433 State education officials interpreted "medical services" to mean care the school offered or arranged on campus — not simple first aid like a bandage or rest in the health room.³³ Routine nurse-dispensed medications parents already authorize through signed school health plans were generally covered by existing school health law, not the deleted rules.³³³⁴ The rollback was aimed at school-facilitated care parents might never hear about otherwise — not at insulin or EpiPens parents already signed off on.

That distinction matters because Washington already allows minors 13 and older to seek mental health treatment without parental consent or notice — including outpatient care under RCW 71.34.530 and inpatient care under RCW 71.34.500³¹³⁵³⁶ — and allows minors to obtain abortion, birth control, emergency contraception, and STI treatment without telling their parents.³⁷ Mental health care today is far broader than talk therapy. Depending on the provider and diagnosis, it can include psychiatric medications, hormones, birth control, emergency contraception, STI treatment, and more. Initiative 2081 added a standalone obligation that schools tell parents before getting involved in that kind of care. HB 1296 removed it. Schools are no longer required to notify parents before helping arrange such care — a counselor referral to an outside clinic for medications or hormone treatment, a school-based health center dispensing birth control or emergency contraception, help arranging an abortion or STI treatment, or ongoing therapy parents may not hear about until behavior changes or an insurance bill arrives.^2329243637 Separate privacy statutes — chapter 70.02 RCW, RCW 71.34.500, and Washington's minor-consent rules — still limit what parents can learn through schools and were left unchanged;^2931373032 HB 1296 removed the extra layer Initiative 2081 had placed on top of them. Parents may learn after the fact, if at all.

HB 1296 also changed campus-removal rules. It deleted Initiative 2081's stand-alone rule requiring immediate notification when a child is taken or removed from campus without permission, including placement at a youth shelter or host home.²³²⁹³⁸ The bill replaced that with the older rule that schools may not remove a child during school hours without parent authorization, while preserving separate laws on youth shelters, runaway youth, and child-abuse reporting that can still allow a child to be sheltered without telling parents right away in some cases.²⁹³⁸ The legislature then attached an emergency clause so the rewrite took effect immediately and could not be challenged at the ballot.³⁹ It also created a new state complaint process, administered by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, that can withhold up to 20% of a district's funding as a last resort.²³³⁹

I will be straight with you about what HB 1296 did not change. The rewrite preserved important Initiative 2081 rights: parents may still review curriculum and textbooks, opt children out of comprehensive sexual-health education and certain surveys, and receive immediate notification if a school employee or contractor is alleged to have physically or sexually abused a child.²⁹³⁹ It also kept immediate parent notification when a criminal action is alleged against a child on school property during the school day — a 48-hour delay was proposed during the session but did not make it into the signed law.²³²⁴ Those protections should stay. But keeping the headline rights while stripping out faster records access, advance notice before school-arranged care, and immediate removal notification is not honoring the petition 418,000 Washingtonians signed. It is walking back the parts that gave parents a real seat at the table when schools get involved in their child's health and welfare.

That is not representation — it is policymaking without consent. I am running to give the 23rd Legislative District a voice Olympia has ignored for too long.