Petition Business Drying Up in ’92

Most Californians don’t know it, but they have Kelly Kimball to thank for Lotto.

He cooked up the 1984 California lottery initiative, persuaded a big lottery contractor to finance it and got the measure on the ballot.

Kimball isn’t much of a gambler. Nor is he an education activist, although lottery profits do help the schools. No, Kimball’s line is petitions. He just wanted to generate some business.

Welcome to the business of democracy, a financial enterprise in which California leaves every place else in the dust.

And make no mistake, it is a business. If money is the mother’s milk of politics, California is one place that moos, and initiatives are only part of the story. Spending on 1990 state and federal campaigns here reached an astonishing $279 million, not counting unreported expenditures by others on behalf of candidates.

That’s about $21 per registered voter, most of it for broadcast advertising, direct mail, consulting fees, office space and staff.

This may be appalling for the electorate, but it can be awfully lucrative for the political operatives, media buyers, broadcasters and countless others who make a living on campaigns.

Tarzana-based Kimball Petition Management, for example, can get your petition on the ballot, having failed only once in more than 100 efforts. All it takes is money. Kimball gets 70 cents per California signature, more than a million of which are needed to be sure of qualifying a single measure statewide.

This year, for those who make a living on California politics, there is good news and there is bad news.

The good news is that, when it comes to campaigns between candidates, 1992 is likely to be a bonanza. There’s the presidential election, of course, but also on the ballot are 80 Assembly, 20 state Senate and 52 congressional seats (seven of them new), all in reapportioned districts that are sure to result in some extraordinarily free spending.

“Even old, established incumbents will have to run campaigns this year, and they can raise the money,” says Paul Croshaw, vice president of sales at Below, Tobe & Associates, a direct-mail firm in Marina del Rey working mostly for Democrats.

Rarer still, both of California’s U.S. Senate seats are at stake. One of those races could cost $50 million.

“It’s one of the best years in history,” affirms Richard Schlackman, president of Campaign Performance Group, a Democratic-oriented direct-mail firm in San Francisco.

The bad news--for those in the politics business, if not for the body politic--is that only $30 million to $40 million will probably be spent on initiatives, says Robert Stern, co-director of the nonprofit California Commission on Campaign Finance, which studies election spending.

What a calamity for people like Kimball. Spending on initiatives in this state was $110 million in 1990 and $127 million in 1988. Fund raising by candidates gets all the attention, but in even-numbered years (when statewide elections are held), initiatives are usually where the money is, particularly because there is no limit on individual or corporate contributions to an initiative drive.

Business was once so good that in 1987 Kimball and his main rival, Sacramento-based American Petition Consultants, were put on retainer by the California Trial Lawyers Assn. and the Assn. of California Insurance Cos., respectively, initially just to keep them from circulating petitions for anyone else in 1988.

But this year there won’t be any initiatives on the ballot in June, and only five or 10 are expected for November. In 1990, there were 18 overall. (The figures exclude ballot measures submitted by the Legislature.)

Thus, Robert Kaplan, a Los Angeles initiative specialist who raised $18 million for an unsuccessful 1988 insurance measure backed by the state’s trial lawyers, hasn’t signed a single client yet this year.

The sharp decline in initiatives is partly because of the experience of November, 1990, when frustrated voters rejected all but three of the bewildering array of initiatives they faced.

But another reason is money. All the candidates and campaigns this year are sucking up every loose political dollar in the state. Not many dollars are loose to begin with, thanks to a recession that is more acute in California--known as a kind of automated teller machine for presidential hopefuls--than in most places outside the Northeast.

Yet increased campaign spending might make up for the initiative shortfall.

“It’s inevitable spending will be higher,” insists Harvey Harlowe Hukari, a GOP political consultant in San Francisco.

Politics in California has been so lucrative that the state became a magnet for political professionals. Many firms, such as Below Tobe and Campaign Performance, have offices only here and in Washington.

Having flourished in the state’s rich political soil, firms such as Kimball’s now export their services to other states. American Petition recently gathered 400,000 signatures for a ballot measure in Michigan. Barry Fadem, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in initiatives, has written a ballot measure for Wyoming. And Kimball repeated his lottery trick in Florida, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Oregon.

California’s hectic politics this year has some people worried that there isn’t enough money in the state to go around.

Fat chance. Listen to Allan Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based GOP consultant who asserts that when all is said and done, “No one’s going to say, ‘I lost because I didn’t spend enough money.’ ”