Posted on 01/29/2006 10:33:19 AM PST by NormsRevenge
After voters resoundingly rejected the entire special-election ballot in November, California's thriving initiative industry has fallen on hard times, at least momentarily.
Only one citizen initiative will be on the June 6 primary-election ballot – actor-director Rob Reiner's universal preschool measure. But dozens of initiatives aimed at the ballot this fall are in the preliminary approval stages.
“I think there was some fatigue among donors and everybody else after the November ballot,” said Dave Gilliard, a Republican political consultant active in ballot proposition campaigns. “I don't think it's a long-term trend.”
Seventy initiatives have been approved for circulation for the ballot this November or are awaiting clearance by the Attorney General's Office, though a number are alternative versions of the same proposal.
Of those, only a few are the object of full-scale petition drives at this point. In many cases, rival interest groups are feeling each other out before deciding whether to proceed with trying to qualify a measure for the ballot.
“It looks to me like a lot of posturing is going on,” said Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman, who directed the campaign that sank Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's special-election ballot agenda. “A number of initiatives have been filed and counter-filed, so it's unclear how much of this makes it to the ballot.”
After voters defeated all four of the governor's initiatives along with four others, a chastened Schwarzenegger said the voters spoke loudly and clearly that they expected the governor and Legislature to solve the state's problems, not push them onto the ballot.
Kaufman agrees.
“If I were advising a client right now, I would tell them to take their time before going to the ballot and make sure there wasn't a legislative fix for what they're trying to do,” she said. “The voters sent a very clear message in November, and people would be smart to listen to the voters.”
Schwarzenegger's special election spawned a yearlong TV advertising blizzard costing hundreds of millions of dollars. It also forced interests that were mapping their own ballot drives for this year to reassess their plans.
Some accelerated their timetables in hopes of getting on the November 2005 ballot, while others held back for fear of being submerged by the tidal wave.
“A lot of folks who were interested in doing initiatives didn't want to be on the same ballot with the governor's because they didn't want to get caught up in the politics of that,” Gilliard said.
That leaves only two propositions that have qualified for the June ballot so far: Reiner's preschool plan, which qualified through a signature-gathering drive, and a $600 million library bond issue placed on the ballot by the Legislature in 2004.
Reiner's initiative would guarantee voluntary preschool for all California 4-year-olds. Its annual cost, estimated at $2.4 billion, would be paid by raising income taxes 1.7 percent for individuals earning more than $400,000 and couples making more than $800,000 a year.
The Reiner camp believes the relatively thin June ballot will work to its advantage.
The preschool initiative will hardly have voters' attention all to itself, with heavily contested primary campaigns for nearly all of the statewide offices sharing the ballot. But it's unlikely to be drowned out in a confusing crossfire over multiple propositions, as voters were subjected to last fall.
“I think it allows us to have a really focused and clear conversation about the benefits of the preschool-for-all initiative on education in California without all the clutter,” Reiner spokesman Nathan James said.
Whether that seeming advantage will hold up is unclear.
“There will be a contested Democratic primary (for governor). I don't know if that influences turnout, but if it does, that would be helpful to Reiner,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California. “On the other hand, if there are a lot of bond issues on the ballot, that could have some fallout.”
By law, propositions placed on the ballot by the Legislature are listed ahead of those that qualify through the initiative process.
While the deadline for initiatives to qualify for the June ballot was Thursday, the Legislature has until March 10 to put propositions on the ballot. Intensive negotiations are continuing over the massive public works bond issues that Schwarzenegger wants to begin taking to the voters this year.
The governor is proposing five separate bond issues – for transportation, education, water, public safety and courts – totaling $25.2 billion for the ballot in 2006.
“If it doesn't happen in June, it's not the end of the world,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. “But our goal is to get it done this year, and June, we think, is not insurmountable. The Legislature is working very diligently on this.”
As for November, one battle already has been averted after sponsors of rival initiatives to ban same-sex marriage and roll back domestic partnership benefits abandoned their plans because of inadequate financing.
Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes of Temecula fell short with his initiative to create a California border police force, but refiled it last month and could try again.
Supporters of the “Jessica's Law” initiative – sponsored by the Republican husband-and-wife legislative team of Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner of Lancaster – are confident they will have more than enough signatures by their Feb. 21 deadline.
Jessica's Law would greatly increase penalties for sex offenders and require paroled offenders to wear satellite-tracked monitoring devices for the rest of their lives.
Initiatives that also could qualify for the November ballot include a water bond, minimum-wage increase and protection of the Proposition 42 transportation fund against raids by the Legislature.
Meanwhile, there are a number of proposed initiatives in the hopper that, if they go forward, would result in past ballot wars being refought.
Veteran anti-tax activist Ted Costa and a coalition of advocacy groups have announced a revised version of last year's unsuccessful Proposition 77, which would have taken the power to redraw political districts away from the Legislature and given it to a panel of retired judges. The measure would have required that new lines be drawn in time for this year's elections.
Under the new version, a citizens commission would redraw the boundaries and follow the normal timetable of redistricting after the 2010 census.
The defeat of another Schwarzenegger-backed initiative, Proposition 75, apparently did not put an end to skirmishing between big business and organized labor over union political power.
In December, the California Chamber of Commerce and California Teachers Association reached a tenuous truce.
The chamber agreed not to support a renewed effort to qualify what supporters call “paycheck protection,” which would require public-employee unions to obtain members' written permission before donating their dues money to political campaigns.
Unions dropped their counter-initiative, a “shareholder protection” measure that would have imposed similar requirements on corporations.
But a new paycheck protection initiative was submitted by Orange County conservative activist Mark Bucher. While California business groups have stayed away from it, unions worried that wealthy individual financiers could emerge, so labor refiled the shareholder protection measure.
The California Nurses Association also is going after business with an initiative that would pay for public financing of political campaigns with increased bank and corporation taxes. The nurses' plan also includes a constitutionally debatable provision limiting contributions to ballot-measure campaigns.
It is unclear whether a serious effort will be made to qualify the campaign financing proposal for the ballot. Nurse association officials say they plan an all-volunteer petition drive. No initiative in decades has qualified for the ballot in California without at least some paid signature-gatherers.
Meanwhile, a renewal of the 1988 war over regulating automobile insurance was averted late Friday when insurance companies and consumer groups agreed to drop rival initiatives.
On another front, a second attempt to modify the 1994 “three strikes” sentencing law is being sponsored by Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley.
Cooley proposes a more modest rollback of the three-strikes law than the unsuccessful Proposition 66 in 2004, which would have mandated that only offenders whose third conviction was classified as a “violent” or “serious” crime could be sentenced to life in prison.
Cooley proposes a more modest rollback of the three-strikes law
From the LA Voice:
This is a good thing. As a favorable editorial in the SanFran Chronicle points out, the new measure (fresh from a hammer-and-tongs drafting session over New Year's weekend) could help prevent Gov. Schwarzenegger from barging ahead with a $200-billion prison-building spree that we just cannot afford.
Cooley and Dunn's plan would stick with the spirit of the original Three Strikes measure by putting repeat rapists, robbers and other hardened felons away for hard time.
But the two-time losers deserve some mercy - not life in the graybar hotel - when they get nailed for minor crimes. Better to spend the prison-construction funds on addiction counseling, work training and other social programs that could bootstrap them off the prison rolls than to lock them away forever at exorbitant expense.
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