Initiative

In 2006, California voters adopted Prop 83, an initiative that put severe restrictions on where sex offenders can live. (Not within 2,000 feet of schools, parks and other areas where children gather). Now the LA Times reports that the state's Sex Offender Management Board says there's no evidence that Prop 83 has reduced crime. There's also not enough available, suitable housing for those who comply with the law. The state is spending $25 million a year to find housing for about 800 folks--a tiny fraction of those affected by the law.

The New York Times looks in on the campaign for an English-only ballot initiative in Nashville. The coalition against the measure is a broad one.

One lesson from earlier efforts at English-only. States and cities that have passed such measures have found them awfully difficult to enforce, as courts overturn such initiatives and politicians ignore them. That seems likely to happen in Nashville, where the mayor and much of the civic leadership opposes the English-only initiative.

Frequent initiative sponsor Tim Eyman is scheduled to announce a new initiative Monday that would limit how much revenue can be collected by state and local governments. Any excess money would be used to reduce property tax bills. Look for this to be pitched as a response to the collapse of the real estate market and the economic crisis. But it's a high-risk policy. With economists of all kinds calling for public investment to stimulate the economy, the state, cities and counties of Washington would instead have to spend less.

To the south, in neighboring Oregon, the business community is preparing an initiative that would guarantee more funding for higher education.

Last fall, Arkansas voters approved an initiative that would ban adoption by unmarried couples. The targets of the measure are gay couples. This week, opponents of the initiative filed suit to overturn it, on the grounds that it violates federal and state constitutional guarantees of equal treatment and due process. It appears to be a well-constructed case. Among the plaintiffs are a married, heterosexual couple. Their complaint is that the initiative statute infringes on their own rights. How? In their will, they would leave custody of their own children to a cousin, who is gay and lives with her partner.

Another bit of good news for the legal challenge. The case has been assigned to a judge who struck down a previous effort to remove gay couples from the state's foster care program. A few more details from a local newspaper story are here.

The San Francisco Chronicle has more here on the ballot initiative, filed by lawyers working for the Califorina Teachers Assn., to raise the sales tax to create a new source of education funding. A proposal to raise taxes for new education funds at a time of budget scarcity won't make the union popular in Sacramento.

But there's a case to be made for such an initiative. Education is often blamed for the state's budget problems, because about half the state budget is devoted to schools. But the education part of the budget is growing more slowly than other items, especially health and social services programs. And if schools are the state's top priority, then their funding should be protected from the vagaries of the economy.

Remember the attempt to qualify a California ballot initiative to allocate the state's electoral votes to the winner in each Congressional district, instead of to the statewide winner? Democrats naturally fought back, because their nominee would lose votes in such a scheme. Among their tactics was to complain to the FEC that then-presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani and his financial backer Paul Singer had violated the law by setting up a company in Missouri to make donations to the initiative effort. The FEC has cleared Giuliani and his presidential commitee of any wrongdoing in the matter. The decision is here.

What would the crime have been? Under federal election law, as amended by McCain-Feingold, candidates for federal office can't participate in non-federal elections. The idea was to close a loophole in the campaign donation limits and prevent federal candidates and committees from skirting the limits by using state committees and campaigns. The ban would seem to apply to state and local ballot initiative campaigns, but the FEC has been divided on the questions of whether initiatives count. The decision in the Giuliani matter doesn't clarify this point. It simply says there's no evidence that Giuliani or his committee was involved in this particular initiative.

The ballot initiative, scheduled to be on the city of Los Angeles ballot in March, sounds good. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would have to install enough solar panels atop buildings to produce 400 megawatts of electricity. But Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten suggests it's a dirty deal. There's no limit on how much electric rates will go up to pay for this. And he suggests the whole thing has been cooked up by the union representing DWP workers--and the very smart political consultants who represent them--as a way to take more money from citizens and give it to some of the best-paid unionized workers in town. Expect to hear more about this.

Ventura County, California -- north and west of Los Angeles -- has become a hotbed of anti-growth ballot initiatives -- measures passed by environmentalists or businesses to prevent other businesses from coming into a particular community. Most of these measures do this by way of requiring a vote of the people on certain kind of developments above a certain size. The latest is in the city of Ventura, within the county of the same name. Its target is Wal-Mart. But this measure doesn't offer a way to override the limit. It simply bans any store that sells groceries and is larger than 90,000 square feet.

The Advocate deconstructs the failed No on 8 campaign to defeat the California initiative ban on same-sex marriage -- and points some fingers. In particular, the Advocate blames the leaders of bisexual, gay and lesbian groups that led the campaign committee. This squares with my own reporting on the subject. These activists didn't reach out and bring in top political folks until it was too late. The Advocate adds fuel to the fire by reporting that two of these leaders -- Lorri Jean of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and Geoff Kors of Equality California -- took long summer vacations. People running big campaigns typically wait until the election is over to do that sort of thing.

This Oakland Tribune story, which quotes your blogger, suggests a number of factors, including the inflexibility of California's initiative system. It's so hard to change initiatives via other means that the default position is to go to court.