Following last year's defeat of liquor privatization Initiative 1100, Costco is returning with another initiative to boot the state out of the booze-selling business. And this time, the retail giant has seemingly learned from its mistakes: Costco's new proposal would generate revenue for the state and throw public safety advocates a bone by limiting store sizes to prevent convenience store booze sales, among other public safety measures.

The initiative is closely modeled after a bill proposed by Costco (that summarily died a quick death) during the regular legislative session. But specifically, the new initiative would:

—Require liquor stores to have at least 10,000 square feet of retail space. This eliminates the possibility of convenience-store liquor sales, and presumably helps limits access to minors.

—Mandate that licensed booze retailers pay 17 percent of their gross spirits revenues to the state. And while this initiative allows retailers to deal directly with wineries and distilleries, it doesn't cut distributors out of the picture completely (as beer distributors feared and fought against last year). Instead, the initiative mandates that licensed distributors pay 10 percent of their gross spirits revenues to the state during the first two years of operation and five percent of their gross revenues to the state after that period.

—It also upends current law to allow wineries and wine distributors to give volume discounts to retail stores and restaurants.

—On a public safety level, the initiative seeks to "make the standard fines and license suspension penalties for selling liquor to minors twice as strong as the existing fines and penalties for selling beer or wine to minors."

The initiative is awaiting a ballot title from the Attorney General, after which it can be challenged in court for a week before the fun begins: signature gathering. Initiative backers will be toiling under a tight deadline—they need to gather 241,153 valid signatures by July 8 in order to qualify for the November 8 ballot.

More to come, I'm sure.