The city's fight over preschool just keeps getting crazier.

This week: Two unions that filed their own preschool initiative and got it on the November ballot are now suing the City of Seattle over the way it will appear on that ballot, they announced at a press conference yesterday afternoon. As you hopefully recall, the city is going to put a pilot version of a potential universal pre-K plan on the ballot this fall, too. The union initiative, I-107, mandates an increase in child-care and pre-K workers' salaries and the creation of a training institute to centralize training for those workers. The city's plan funds a three-year experiment of offering subsidized preschool for up to 2,000 Seattle kids, funded by a property tax.

The city council decided that the two plans are two ballot measures on the same issue, and that therefore they legally must be presented to voters as an either-or choice; you couldn't vote yes on both of them. The initiative backers, a campaign calling themselves Yes for Early Success, think that's insane. And after filing an ethics complaint against the city in late June, they've now sued to get the two measures separated on the ballot so voters can vote up or down on each of them. (PDF of the lawsuit here.)

Yes for Early Success's lawyer, Claire Tonry, called the city's move "unprecedented interference with Seattle's 100-year-old initiative process," saying that by offering voters a limited choice, the city is preventing the 30,000 voters who signed the initiative from exercising their right to vote on it. They're asking the court to make clear that the two measures are "entirely compatible" and can be offered to voters as two separate choices, and to make sure voter pamphlet language on the two measures is "unbiased."

I-107's backers say the initiative would address the high turnover of early education teachers and child care workers, by improving pay and offering high-quality, streamlined training, and that it has little to do with the small-scale pilot program the city's putting to voters. The city, led by Council President Tim Burgess and Mayor Ed Murray, has said their hands are tied, that the law says the two measures are not compatible and must compete. Now, in a hearing on August 12, we'll find out what a judge thinks.

How did we get here?

How did we get from the lauded idea of universal pre-K, which the mayor calls the most morally important program he'll ever enact, an idea these unions say they absolutely support, an issue everyone should've come together to agree on, to a knock-down drag-out fight that's going all the way to the court system and then to voters?

No one on either side wants to talk on the record yet, but here's some version of what must've happened: It's pretty clear that I-107 was designed to be a tool. Just like the $15 wage advocates, the unions representing pre-K workers (SEIU 925 and the American Federation of Teachers) filed an initiative to hold over the mayor's head, to force the city into giving them a seat at the table. It's a smart move, and it can work. But at some point, the bluff was called—were the union's demands unreasonable, or was the city needlessly uncompromising? We just don't know yet. But when negotiations broke down, the initiative moved forward, and now we have two sides, both of whom have a complicated combination of political self-interest and genuine interest in helping kids, in a nasty battle.

What'll this mean for voters? Well, you're going to see both of these on the ballot this fall. Whether you'll have the opportunity to vote yes on both, or whether you'll have to choose between them will be decided by a judge. What does this mean for Mayor Murray's lock-everyone-in-a-room-and-force-them-to-reach-consensus style of politics? Well, for one thing: It doesn't always work.