Question: Are citizen initiatives getting out of control?
Right Lane: Scott K Fish
A citizen initiative [CI] is a way for Maine citizens to turn ideas into law. Mary Adams is leading a CI right now-the Maine Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). TABOR was started by Mainers sick of out-of-control government spending and politicians who keep spending. TABOR would cap all government spending except when voters OK extra spending
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Mary Adams has led campaigns to defeat CIs, too: the ABC forestry issue (1996), the NO side of the Forest Compact (1997). But she is a CI defender. You can make book on some legislator, each year, trying to choke the CI process to death. Since 1979, Mary Adams has led the charge to stop such legislators. "I would rather beat back the [citizen] initiatives I don't like and keep the 'citizen lifeboat' for future issues I care about," Adams said.
"Trying to kill citizen initiatives in their crib is a symptom of the arrogance of legislators once they get to Augusta. They become constituents of each other more than the folks back home. I wish legislators would stop making the excruciatingly difficult citizen initiative process an impossible one," Adams said.
A CI is hard work. Adams' TABOR group is all volunteers-including Mary. The first step was putting TABOR-the-idea into legal form with our secretary of state's (SoS) help. This includes creating a question explaining TABOR's goals, which you see on TABOR signature petitions and, later, on voter ballots: "Do you want to limit increases in state and local government spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth and to require voter approval for all tax and fee increases?"
Mary Adams then put up a TABOR website, set up a Political Action Committee (PAC), and started building an organization to collect signatures at Election Day polls last November. Collecting signatures is among the toughest CI tasks. TABOR needs 50,000 valid voter signatures-with 10,000 extra as insurance against invalid signatures.
Adams said, "It's tough to get 1-in-10 people who voted in the previous election for governor. That's what the constitution requires to put a CI on the ballot."
Once the signatures are certified by the SoS, TABOR goes to the Maine Legislature. "It will be scheduled for a hearing; people will testify for and against it," said Adams. "It goes to the House and Senate. They can enact it exactly as it's printed or not. If they don't enact it, it goes to referendum in November 2006."
CI critics say Mainers should rely solely on our legislature for lawmaking. Mary Adams disagrees. In TABOR's case, she said it would be bad "for the same reason you don't pull out your own teeth...it would be too painful for [legislators], and they can't see well enough to do it."
Scott K Fish is owner and editor of www.asmainegoes.com, a website he founded in 1998 to inspire lively political debate on issues important to Maine people. He lives in Dixmont.
Left Lane: Sean Faircloth
A few years back, an "exotic dancer" called to me outside the Bangor post office. She was gathering signatures for a local initiative on behalf of Diva's "gentleman's club." The initiative proposed to change zoning ordinances affecting Diva's.
The legislature was considering a bill to define certain paid sexual activities as prostitution. She acknowledged that she engaged in this paid sexual activity, which was, then, legal.
The exotic dancer had an engaging manner. Men were particularly willing to listen to her. She gathered many signatures with a familiar phrase: "Just help us get it on the ballot." People didn't read what they were signing.
This young woman was merely trying to protect her livelihood, yet it struck me that this might not be the deliberative legislative process founding fathers like James Madison had in mind. Citizen initiatives are indeed a law-making process.
Last November at the polls, I was reminded of the exotic dancer. There were petition gatherers for both a "conservative" cause and a "liberal" cause. The gatherers asked people to sign "just to get it on the ballot." It actually costs taxpayers several thousand dollars "just to get initiatives on the ballot."
As is traditional for legislators, I stood at the polls the entire Election Day and made these observations:
1. Many voters went to the petition circulator table thinking it was the polling place, and, while there, were encouraged to sign "just to get it on the ballot."
2. Signature gatherers made almost no effort to encourage people to read what they were signing, and almost no one did;
3. Citizens had no way of knowing how much a proposed law would cost taxpayers, what programs might be cut, or the cost of putting the issue on the November ballot in the first place;
4. People had no way of knowing if petition circulators were idealistic volunteers or paid by out-of-state interest groups.
Use of the initiative process has increased dramatically. In its first 40 years there were six citizen initiatives on the ballot. In the past 35 years there have been six times as many.
In the legislature, amendments can be offered correcting errors or making improvements. With initiatives, it's all or nothing on a law, often many pages long, which most voters never read.
These petition efforts are sometimes funded by big-money interests. Remember the big out-of-state bucks supporting Jonathan Carter's Green Party forestry initiative? Elizabeth Noyce once funded almost an entire initiative on her well-heeled lonesome. No crime in that, but it's a far cry from what idealistic reformers had in mind when citizen initiatives were created in Teddy Roosevelt's day. Today organizations funding initiative petitions are not even required to report their spending to the Commission on Governmental Ethics during the signature-gathering stage.
Initiative campaigns are often driven by glib marketing and 30-second ads that have less to do with James Madison than Madison Avenue. Keep this in mind next time someone asks you to sign a petition "just to get it on the ballot."
Rep. Sean Faircloth [D-Bangor] returned to the legislature in 2002 after serving in the 1990s. In between, he spearheaded the creation of the Maine Discovery Museum.
