COLUMN ONE : Initiatives: Time for Reform? : Critics say the process, designed to let the people overrule an unresponsive government, has become unwieldy and subject to manipulation.

It’s the kind of righteous, grab-for-the-throat Direct Democracy that so much of the world seems to yearn for. Citizens on the march and with sheer force of numbers brashly writing the laws, even rewriting the foundations of their own constitution. Never mind standing up to dictators and tyrants. Here, Californians can elbow their way around the freely elected state government and take care of business directly at the ballot box.

And each election they do, by the millions.

It’s hard to fathom California without initiatives.

What would property taxes be like without Proposition 13 of 1978?

How much of the seashore would be fenced off for the super-rich without 1972’s coastal preservation initiative?

Would there have been a death-penalty law without an initiative in 1972? And who would have eliminated inheritance taxes if not for citizens behind a 1982 proposition? What of marijuana? The lottery? Boxing? Dog pounds? Daylight-saving time? And all the other matters, big and small, where consensus was sought by initiative?

Yet, at the beginning of a new decade, on the doorstep of a new century, this most eloquent and straightforward of democracy’s expressions has sailed into heavy weather.

So many people of so many political stripes are so unhappy with the process that cries for reform are being taken seriously for the first time in a generation. This “people’s law,” itself a reform born of the social turmoil of the beginning of the century, is center stage in the political turmoil at the century’s conclusion.

“People keep saying the initiative process is being abused,” says Sherry Meddick of Silverado Canyon in Orange County.

She should know. A volunteer for the Voter Revolt group, which sponsored the Proposition 103 insurance initiative in 1988, Meddick spends hours each month knocking on the doors of Orange County voters on behalf of one cause or another. “A lot of people are fed up. They are asked to spend 30 minutes outside of Payless signing initiative petitions before they can even get in the door. It’s too much.”

Practically everywhere frustration is mounting--in boardrooms, in political caucus rooms, in living rooms, on the floor of the state Legislature, in the farm fields, even among those whose livelihoods depend on the flourishing political initiative industry.

Proposition 103 is most commonly cited as the culprit. It targeted insurance companies for a taste of a real citizens’ backlash and promised rate rollbacks. But instead, it resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the insurance industry, alone among private businesses, has a constitutional right to make a profit. And, as all motorists know, rollbacks seem to be a fat chance now.

The complaints with the initiative process are familiar: There are too many initiatives; they are too complex; they are no better than common candidates in living up to their promises; they are inflexible; the whole process has been co-opted by special interests without regard for the common good; politicians are abusing a procedure designed for use by citizens; layers of initiative laws have bollixed up state government so badly it has no chance to function effectively.

There is also the fear that a new political industry has been created, forced to perpetuate initiatives to keep itself alive and wealthy, policy be damned.

Just listen to some of the voices of politics in the 1990s:

“We’re been stung over and over again!” says Dianne Feinstein, Democratic candidate for governor. “Initiatives are not a substitute for leadership.”

“I want people in government to figure out a lot of these problems for me--that’s what they’re paid for,” says Sheila Goldberg, a community activist in Venice. “I’d have no trouble voting on whether legislators should have limited terms of office. But it’s not fair to ask me something like how California water should be divided north vs. south--that’s way too complicated. And it’s no way to govern.”

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown: “When I go out and speak to business groups, whether it’s in the Inland Empire or San Francisco, when I talk to groups of people, the No. 1 topic is how to reform the initiative process.”

But wait.

For all of the flaws of the initiative process, isn’t California better off than states without initiatives? Champions of the initiative say the answer is yes.

If the state was really responsive to the citizenry and imaginative in governance, initiatives would not be needed, say supporters of the initiative process.

And moreover, some wary advocates believe critics of the system are motivated as much by the rewards of commerce as the regards of civics. It is not just coincidence, they contend, that Establishment demands for “reform” reach a pitch just as Populist-leaning liberals seem on the verge of mastering the initiative system for their ends--aiming initiatives at the cigarette and liquor and pesticide and timber industries.

“There are all kinds of interest groups who want to get rid of initiatives. After all, we’re up against some of the most powerful interests there are--oil, pesticides, alcohol, tobacco, insurance, developers. . . . They are like gorillas in the candy store. And they’re irritated,” says Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica). He has championed various populist measures in the past and now directs the campaign for the environmentalist “Big Green” initiative to limit pesticides, timber cutting and emissions of so-called greenhouse gases.

California is one of 26 states with some form of initiative, direct or indirect.

Rules are simple: If you want to make a law, you must undertake some filing formalities with the state, then obtain signatures of 5% of the voting population (that is, those who voted in the last election for governor) within a span of 150 days. Your proposition will be voted upon in the next statewide election. If you want to amend the constitution, bring in the signatures of 8%. Initiatives pass or fail by majority vote.

This year, you’ll need 372,178 valid signatures for a statutory initiative and 595,485 valid names for a constitutional amendment--underlining the word valid . Many people who are not registered voters sign petitions and some sign them twice, making their names invalid. So, signature gatherers must accumulate a cushion of 20% or more to assure their proposition a place on the ballot.

Simple, yes. Easy, no.

In the 78-year history of the initiative in California, 730 propositions have been attempted or are in circulation today, according to a report by the secretary of state. Less than one-third qualified for the ballot. Of those which did, only 66 were approved and became law--less than 10% of the total.

And there is no denying that initiatives are popular now like never before. Nearly two-thirds of those ever attempted have been produced in the past 20 years. In the last two years alone, more initiatives have been proposed than during the combined decades of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

What makes today’s initiative process so difficult and sometimes so contentious is that it has outgrown its grass-roots.

Kelly Kimball is one of the foremost political professionals in the initiative business. His Kimball Petition Management Inc. of Los Angeles fields the legions of workers who collect the signatures to qualify proposals for the ballot--at a cost of 67 to 75 cents per voter.

By his memory, only one contemporary initiative--the 1982 call for a nuclear weapons freeze--qualified wholly with volunteers collecting the signatures. All the remainder required hired hands. And that worries him, even though it is good for business in the short run.

“The problem: We have to get so many signatures in so little time, you have to have professional signature gatherers. That means money. And this system was not created for that purpose--it was created so people could get out from under the influence of special interests,” Kimball said.

Signature gathering has become not only big business, but a sophisticated and controversial one. Criticism is widespread about signature gatherers misrepresenting their petitions--for instance, describing their initiative as one sponsored by environmentalists when industry is the real backer. Kimball tells of gatherers who sign up to collect signatures at rock-bottom prices and then hoard their petitions, waiting for the desperate sponsors to increase the bounty for fear they will not qualify.

Costs, of course, extend way beyond just gathering signatures. The 1988 ballot fight among lawyers, insurance companies and consumer activists ran up a campaign price tag of more than $100 million.

Moreover, there is the feeling that initiatives don’t necessarily accomplish what they promise. Few have the feeling today that the insurance “crisis” is any closer to being solved than before the 1988 elections. Proposition 65 was billed as the clean water proposal of 1986; hardly anyone expected it would result in warning labels being plastered all over gasoline pumps, saloons and in newspaper advertisements.

Even the constitutionality of Proposition 13, which promised fair property taxes, is under attack as unfair. And for all the fanfare and fuming over the vaunted coastal initiative, it has opened up barely 50 miles of seashore to public access in 18 years of effort.

Interviews with two dozen politicians, initiative activists, business and public-interest leaders finds there is common ground for reform.

In particular, there is widespread, if vague, support for some sort of indirect initiative process--in which citizen proposals are subjected to some open hearing and deliberation by the Legislature before they go on the ballot. California once had such a process but it was poorly designed, and abolished in 1966.

Under an indirect initiative, citizens can gather just some of the signatures they need, say half. At that point, the Legislature is summoned for hearings and action on the topic. Afterward, if sponsors are unsatisfied with the results, they collect the remainder of the signatures and place their proposal on the ballot anyway.

The idea is to try to fashion more effective, crisper law by subjecting initiatives to scrutiny. And it gives the government a chance to respond.

But the Legislature has defeated this, and most other initiative “reforms,” fearing a backlash from a citizenry deeply suspicious of any tampering with its direct path to democracy.

Still, Assembly Speaker Brown and other leaders on both sides of the question believe the 1990s will see intensified struggle over the terms of initiative politics.

Some lawmakers are plainly out to block initiatives. Among the bills proposed in the 1990 Legislature was one by Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael) that would require signature gatherers to collect roughly the same number of signatures in each of the state’s counties, big or small, a burden that would probably kill off the process except in the most extreme cases.

Brown prefers some sort of indirect initiative process, an increase in signature requirements for qualification and a new law requiring voters to swear under penalty of perjury that they had read the proposal they were signing.

He is particularly critical of one of the most recent and novel developments in initiative politics--”logrolling.” The Planning and Conservation League is the founder of this idea, which works this way. In its 1988 initiative drive for park bonds, the league went from community to community and from group to group. You want a park? Well, then collect some signatures for us, give us some campaign support and we’ll put your park on the list of projects to be financed. It passed. A somewhat similarly qualified measure to promote rail transportation awaits voters in June.

“If we did that in the Legislature, that’s what we go to jail for,” Brown fumes. “(But) this helps those of us who are ready for reform to gain adherents.”

The charge brings a laugh from conservation league’s Gerald Meral. The group’s stratagem, as he sees it, is exactly the same time-honored method used to ram a park acquisition bill through Congress. Every time someone objects, give them a park for their district back home. “Let’s face it--that’s American politics,” he says.

Reform is a concern of the late Howard Jarvis’ Taxpayer Assn., a group that remains an active and potent force in initiative politics. It is now halfway to qualifying a November, 1990, ballot measure that would force any change in the rules of initiatives to be approved by voters.

“This is the people’s law and we feel any changes should be voted on by the people,” said Joel Fox, the association’s president.

Later in the decade, the future of the initiative may depend on the results of the 1990 governor’s race.

Democrat John K. Van de Kamp, California’s attorney general, put three major planks of his platform into initiatives in a gambit to let Californians vote-for-me, vote-for-my-ideas. If he wins, he will be challenged to see if he can govern the old-fashioned way without initiatives.

Suspicious of initiatives, Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco, suggests she could govern in such a way as to make them unnecessary.

Republican Pete Wilson, who is chairing a June initiative drive on crime and speedy trials, would probably stay more with the status quo, leaving California, as he says, “a little better and sometimes a little worse” for having the initiative process.

To fully appreciate the turbulence of today, it may be helpful to recall some of the roots of the initiative process in California.

Some see parallels between the beginning of the 20th Century and the approach of the 21st. Special interests held the Legislature in their grip back then, chiefly the Southern Pacific Railroad. Citizens felt powerless. Money talked.

Reform candidate for governor Hiram Johnson harnessed the public unrest and swept into office with other like-minded reformers. And in October, 1911, they produced the initiative process as a check against future special-interest control of the Legislature.

Two months later, Los Angeles residents put their new rights into action.

This newspaper was the target of the drive. As David D. Schmidt, director of the Initiative Resource Center in San Francisco, recounted in his book “Citizen Lawmakers,” citizens passed a local measure establishing a “reformist,” citizen-owned newspaper to counter the Establishment Los Angeles Times.

The weekly Los Angeles Municipal News failed a year later, but there was no end to other colorful and controversial subjects that attracted citizens’ fancy when it came to writing their own laws.

Statewide initiatives over the past eight decades have touched an amazing range of subjects. The rights and wrongs of social behavior are favorites. Drinking, drugs and all forms of gambling have been the subject of initiative drives, and the results have been mixed.

Nothing has been more important than taxes. The first successful ballot proposition abolished the poll tax in 1914. Proposition 13’s forced reduction in property taxes made a national hero of its author, Howard Jarvis, and set the tone for tax-cutting politics in the 1980s.

The treatment of animals has been another recurring theme. An attempt to prohibit vivisection was defeated in 1922. Limits on circus acts and training, regulation of dog pounds, and methods for killing dogs and cats arose over the years. This June, voters will have a chance to outlaw the hunting of mountain lions.

Getting reapportionment out of the hands of the Legislature is one of today’s hot political battles between Democrats and Republicans. But it is nothing new. It was on the ballot as far back as 1926.

Citizens have taken on more offbeat subjects--like instituting daylight-saving time in 1949 after rejecting it in 1939. They approved restrictions on prizefights in 1913, but the next year rejected a law requiring people to observe one day of rest in every seven.

It’s imperfect. But it’s ours.

And maybe it’s ours to export, too.

Signature gatherer Kimball just returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, where leaders of emerging democracies sought advice in the drafting of their constitutions from American political professionals.

“Our presentations were among the most popular, and most controversial,” Kimball said.

“That would be expected. It’s one thing to have a democracy. It’s another to let it run loose.”

CALIFORNIA BALLOT MEASURES, 1884-1989

Chart shows number of ballot measures put before the voters over the years in California.

Legislature Voter Total Passed Decade Sponsored Sponsored Proposed by Voters 1880s 7 * 7 4 1890s 33 * 33 17 1900s 55 * 55 35 1910s 94 41 135 77 1920s 71 46 117 65 1930s 91 47 138 58 1940s 75 21 96 55 1950s 82 13 95 60 1960s 87 9 96 62 1970s 120 22 142 95 1980s 91 48 139 104

* The Initiative and Referenda were adopted in 1911

Source: California Almanac

Compiled by Times editorial researcher Michael Meyers