By Josh Feit

The state legislature got stuck on the second provision of the elevator reform bill we reported on earlier this month. The evidently controversial section would have directed the state’s Department of Labor and Industries to support harmonization between national and international elevator standards

Currently, elevators cost three times as much in the US and Canada as they do in the rest of the world, thanks to inflexible standards that limit elevator production, installation, and repair to a handful of companies. Among other issues, elevators have to be much larger here than in other countries, where builders can choose from a much longer roster of safe, reliable elevator companies.

The legislation, which passed the senate early this month before getting amended in the house this week, would still shrink elevator size requirements in smaller apartment buildings; that provision was a YIMBY goal to help lower costs for missing-middle housing. But the harmonization standard was meant to elevate Washington as a national example and lead other states to follow suit in a challenge to the elevator industry’s monopolistic hold over the US. That larger goal could have helped bring down elevator costs across the board.

As they say: follow the money.  While several groups testified in  favor of the original bill, including both the commercial real estate association and  housing density environmentalists from Futurewise and Sightline, there was only one opponent: The National Elevator Industry, Inc. Their lobbying firm? McBride Public Affairs.

It’s not so much that the elevator industry is writing gargantuan checks to McBride ($9,000 in total from the NEII and elevator company TK Elevator combined this month.) It’s that McBride’s list of clients—AMGEN, Boeing, Honda, McDonald’s, Uber, Molson Coors, and it goes on—means McBride has a hold over legislators. McBride’s client list is so all-encompassing, they also represent NAIOP WA, the real estate advocates who testified in favor of the legislation.

One of the main proponents of the bill is elevator reform advocate Stephen Smith; he wrote an influential in-depth study of the elevator industry oligopoly and its inflationary hold on the North American market. Smith wouldn’t speak to the behind scenes efforts of his foes to sway votes. But he quipped: “I hope it isn’t an anticompetitive effort to keep barriers to entry in the market and stop smaller manufacturers from entering.”