Prior Restraint

Nice work if you can get it. The two largest firms in California that solicit signatures to qualify initiative petitions for the election ballot have been retained to not circulate petitions. The firms have been tied up by the Assn. of California Insurance Companies and the California Trial Lawyers Assn., which also have agreed not to field petition campaigns against each other in regard to insurance issues.

Thus, at least three potential initiative campaigns to control insurance premiums and/or to limit court awards for pain and suffering and other non-economic damages in accident cases may have been squelched before they could get started. With 325,000 signatures required to win a place on the ballot for a proposed change in state law, it is extremely difficult to run a successful campaign without the professional signature-gathering firms, political experts said.

“They’re tying up the talent,” Mike Arno, who runs American Petition Consultants, told The Times’ Kenneth Reich. Specifically, Arno has a contract to do any initiative work the insurance industry might have to conduct before the 1988 elections. The same contract prohibits Arno’s firm from working with anyone else on initiatives dealing with insurance.

Kelly Kimball of Kimball Petition Management Inc. said that his company has a similar arrangement with the trial lawyers.

The secretary of state’s office said this tactic did not seem to violate any state laws, but Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn asked federal authorities to investigate what he claimed was “a major conspiracy to obstruct the citizens’ basic right to vote.”

The insurance industry and the trial lawyers have fought bitter and costly battles down through the years over efforts to limit the amount of damages that trial lawyers can seek in behalf of their clients from insurance firms. The two powerful organizations agreed in August not to conduct initiative petition campaigns against each other in 1988.

Some of the other proponents insist that they will qualify their measures anyway, in which case either the trial lawyers or the insurance companies, or both, might be forced to enter the initiative fray after all. That would seem to guarantee a costly and confusing campaign that probably would not result in good legislation.

None of this would be necessary, of course, if the state Legislature had adequately dealt with this issue of extreme interest to all Californians.