Monday we released Initiative 522: Costly, Flawed and Ill-Conceived. Here is the executive summary, and here is the full report.

Yesterday, KOMO reporter Keith Eldridge interviewed WRC economist Kriss Sjoblom. Watch the segment that aired last night here.

“The cost of the initiative for a family of four would be upwards from $450 a year,” said Kriss Sjobom with Washington Research Center.

Erik Smith offers extensive analysis of the I-522 and our report in Washington State Wire.

For anyone to make the claim that I-522 will cost nothing is absurd, says Kriss Sjoblom of the Washington Research Council. “The debate is not about whether there are going to be costs, but really about how big the costs are going to be.”

Smith reviews the economic evidence and proponents’ misleading assertion that I-522 “won’t cost a dime.”

Certainly it won’t cost a dime, allows the Research Council’s Sjoblom – tens and hundreds of millions is more like it. The Research Council, a Washington-based business-oriented think tank, was commissioned by the no-on-522 campaign to produce a report summarizing all known cost impacts of the measure. At the same time the campaign commissioned an economic analysis by Northbridge Environmental Management Consultants, the same firm that estimated costs of the California initiative.

Together the reports offer a rather convincing argument that the cost will be decidedly north of zero.

Read the entire piece. It’s very well done, readable and comprehensive.