Eight months after voters shot down a citizen-led initiative to establish a Worker’s Bill of Rights in Olympia, the Olympia City Council on Tuesday formally resumed discussions on possible city policy to address worker protections.
The City of Olympia first started discussions on addressing minimum wage, predictive scheduling and workplace safety back in 2024.
The goal of the discussion was to help address community concerns about the cost of living and job safety for lower wage earners, according to Assistant City Manager Stacey Ray.
In response to an outpouring of community feedback in 2024, the City of Olympia slowed down its process and began conducting additional research.
The city was in the process of conducting that research when the citizen-led initiative Proposition 1 was proposed in mid-2025.
If passed, that initiative would have established a Workers’ Bill of Rights within the City of Olympia that, in addition to providing some new worker protections, would have raised minimum wage within the City of Olympia to $20 an hour.
The Olympia City Council voted 4-3 in July 2025 against approving the initiative outright, sending it to the November 2025 ballot for voters to weigh in.
Proposition 1 ultimately failed 52.19% to 47.81%.
After the measure failed, Olympia City Council directed staff to bring the topic back to them in 2026 for possible action.
City staff did so on Tuesday, July 14, proposing a timeline for research and public engagement efforts ahead of anticipated council action in early 2027.
“It picks up where we left off in 2025 and yet is also very early in this process,” Ray said Tuesday.
Olympia Mayor Dontae Payne clarified Tuesday that the Olympia City Council does not intend to disregard the will of the voters by just incorporating the failed Workers Bill of Rights into city code.
“What we're not doing is turning around and then doing what the voters said they didn't want to do anyway. We're not. What we're doing is continuing a process that we were actually working on before the initiative actually came to the scene,” Payne said.
The proposed timeline for resuming that process has Olympia city staff continuing with research, data gathering and stakeholder listening sessions through September, at which time the Olympia City Council would hold a worksession to review early findings.
Public engagement would ramp up from October to December as city staff conduct additional research and hold more stakeholder listening sessions.
City staff would use the information they gathered to develop options for Olympia City Council to consider.
Olympia City Council would be expected to hear those options, and ideally decide on one to pursue, between January and March 2027.
“We would remain transparent and communicative about the process throughout and we’d provide feedback to the community on how their input influenced the decisions,” Ray said Tuesday.
Council members supported resuming the work to address worker protections and affordability in Olympia, though some expressed concerns that the proposed timeline was overly ambitious.
Responding to public commenters who expressed a strong desire for public engagement throughout the process and voiced concerns about not being heard previously, Payne said, “I am a little bit skeptical about doing a thorough process within the timeline that I'm seeing here, and just a little concerned about again having folks in the chambers in January, February, March saying that they weren't engaged.”
He added, “I'm hoping that we can find a way to strike that balance of engaging as many people as we can in a shorter time frame that doesn't take a year or two.”
Mayor Pro Tem Yến Huỳnh also expressed concerns about getting the necessary work done within the proposed timeline without overwhelming city staff.
“While I don't want this to be a years-long process, I also I'm really concerned about staff capacity,” Huỳnh said.
Council members discussed the importance of engaging the whole community, specifically certain sectors of the workforce such as elderly employees, nonprofit organizations, workers who are not represented by a union, and those in the healthcare and childcare fields.
“I know this is a significant body of work, but I think what we learned or heard from the initial request that came forward back in 2024, and then certainly from the initiative, is there's definitely a need for this work,” said Council Member Kelly Green, voicing support for the proposed timeline. “There are very real, very current issues with this, and the longer the process takes, the longer before we even consider it.”
Council Member Robert Vanderpool warned against treating the issue as a “one-and-done process,” advocating for incorporating labor and working class affordability policies into other aspects of Olympia’s long-term plans.
He proposed creating a new position within city staff specifically to focus on crafting labor and working class affordability policies.
“Traditionally, local governments don't do this work, right? Usually, it's states and the federal government. But because of that downward pressure and the fact that people trust us as a local government, we may have to take on more responsibility along these lines,” Vanderpool said. “This systemic issue is too large for a one-and-done process in which we continue to only support half the economy. And yes, this is not a traditional city thing, but we're also not a traditional city.”
Council Member Dani Madrone said she would be satisfied with having a list of identified sectors to engage with ready by the September work session.
“It's kind of like defining the research question. It's defining who's being engaged,” she said.
The Olympia City Council did give city staff the go-ahead to embark on the first phase of research, data-gathering and stakeholder listening sessions, and to present their early findings at a council work session in September.
That work session has not yet been scheduled.
The process is being helmed by Olympia Assistant City Manager Stacey Ray, who can be reached sray@ci.olympia.wa.us.
