The Nation: Helm's Crusade

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Last April, Washington state legislators decided that they were not being paid enough for the roughly 90 days per year they spend in Olympia, the capital. They accordingly voted themselves a 193% salary increase−from $3,600 to $10,560. At the same time, they raised the Governor's pay from $32,500 to $47,300, the Lieutenant Governor's from $10,000 to $22,000, and the state attorney general's from $23,000 to $37,950. A number of other salaries were also raised, the total increases amounting to $1,359,059 annually.

The bill struck a nerve of Naderian outrage in a Seattle furniture salesman named Bruce Helm, 32. When the state supreme court upheld the new law−which incidentally gave supreme court justices a $5,000 annual pay raise−Helm began organizing a campaign to place the salary issue on the state ballot in November. Helm and his friends had only 2½ weeks in which to raise the 117,902 voter signatures necessary to place their initiative on the ballot; similar efforts have required 60 days.

But a certain civic indignation seems to be in the air this summer. Volunteers poured in to help. Families leaving on vacation stopped at Helm's headquarters, his father-in-law's furniture store, to pick up copies of the petition to distribute along their routes. Private pilots crisscrossed the state, dropping off petitions and picking them up. Ham operators set up a communications network to coordinate the drive. The Seattle Times, among others, endorsed the drive against "underhanded raids on the treasury." In some wonder, Helm observed: "This isn't just a grass-roots movement. It goes right down to the sod." By last week's filing deadline, the initiative calling for salary rollbacks had gathered almost 700,000 signatures, nearly six times as many as necessary and equivalent to one-third of the state's registered voters. Olympians, prepare for a wage freeze.