Making of a Ballot Initiative

Last September, Reed Hastings, a onetime teacher who struck it rich in the Silicon Valley software industry, finagled a pass to hear President Clinton speak to educators and others in this Bay Area town. The topic was one Hastings had been thinking about.

Clinton called for the creation of 3,000 charter public schools by the year 2000. Hastings--whose firm had trouble finding qualified staff in California--liked what he heard, did some quick calculations and realized that if this goal were to be met, California would need 500 such schools.

Hastings had been toying with the idea of entering the political fray to promote the charter schools cause. After hearing Clinton, he was determined. His plan: to launch a ballot initiative that would make it easier for parents and teachers to recast individual public schools as charter public schools. That would give them sway over everything from what gets taught to who gets hired as the principal.

To put his idea before the public this November, Hastings entered perhaps the most rough-and-tumble corner of California politics. The initiative game is as tough here as anywhere in America, played by a colorful mix of promoters and consultants.

Hastings, using his wealth and donations from others in Silicon Valley, assembled a team of some of the state’s savviest political lawyers, lobbyists and consultants. “You have to go into it very humble,” he said. “If you don’t know anything [about initiatives] and pretend you do, you get slaughtered.”

Hastings quickly learned Lesson 1, something old hands long have known, especially in California, the nation’s initiative capital: Money is the key.

“If you have $1 million, you can get anything on the ballot,” said Bob Stern of the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. Ideas for initiatives come cheap. Leading to this year’s June and November ballots, 97 would-be initiative promoters paid a $200 filing fee to the state attorney general and proposed measures on everything from a ban on gay marriages to three that promote significant new tobacco taxes. There are nine on the June ballot; perhaps 10 will garner the necessary petition signatures and make it to a statewide vote in November.

What almost always sets that handful apart is cash. The money pays for lawyers who specialize in drafting the measures, petition circulators and initiative campaign consultants. These consultants don’t have the hassle of worrying about a politician’s closeted skeletons.

“With ballot issues, you build your own candidate,” said Rick Claussen, campaign manager for Hastings’ proposal and a veteran of 19 initiative fights across the country, 18 of those victorious. “You don’t have spouses telling you how to run the campaign. You don’t have eruptions in the middle of the campaign.”

Option Outside Legislature

The initiative business is one of free agents. Alliances shift from ballot to ballot. Allies on Hastings’ measure have been combatants in the past and will be in the future. California’s initiative experts also are an itinerant breed, exporting their services to other states.

Although the first initiative laws were adopted in South Dakota, the process was expanded and refined in California. When the tax-cutting Proposition 13 passed in 1978, the initiative industry took hold.

The power of the initiative often dominates California government, even though Gov. Hiram Johnson and other Progressives of the early 1900s heralded the idea simply as a tool citizens could use to bring the powerful to heel.

As Stern notes, voters reject two-thirds of initiatives at the polls--and still the ballot measures shape taxation, school financing, college admissions, how lawmakers are elected and much more. With campaigns waged over the airwaves and costing millions, it is hardly a little person’s game.

Mike Bowman of the conservative Capitol Resource Institute tried to raise money in December for a ballot measure to require parental consent before minors could get abortions, but he could drum up less than $50,000.

“Look at what’s on the ballot. It’s . . . special interests that are doing it,” Bowman said.

This month, the most visible part of the initiative industry, the petition circulators, has been out in force outside supermarkets and in malls. They call themselves grass-roots activists, although they’re paid for their activism--$1, more or less, for each voter they persuade to sign a petition.

April is like Christmas rush for promoters aiming to place measures on the November ballot. They must talk hundreds of thousands of voters into signing their petitions, and submit the names to election officers by April 17, although promoters often push the deadline--at their own risk--to the end of the month.

Election officials vet the petitions to ensure there are enough signatures of registered voters. Initiatives to create statutes need 433,269 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Constitutional amendments, like Hastings’, need 693,230--numbers based on a percentage of voters in the last election. Because many signatures ultimately are deemed invalid, circulators obtain 1.2 million names for constitutional amendments, 700,000 for statutes.

Circulators are hawking at least eight petitions for November. One promises to ban the export of horse meat from California for human consumption. One would expand gambling on Indian reservations. Three, including Hastings’, promise to improve education. To greater or lesser degrees, all have gone through the same process as Hastings’ measure.

Hastings set out on a search last year for some way to help rescue California’s public education system, after his company was bought for $775 million. Like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the 37-year-old Hastings fretted about having to look outside California to hire engineers at the firm he founded in 1991, Pure Software. Schools here simply didn’t produce enough qualified applicants.

He attended conferences, spoke to experts and read about education. He even enrolled in Stanford’s masters program in education policy. He also had some first-hand experience: For three years in his 20s, he had taught high school math in the Peace Corps in Africa.

Hastings resorted to the initiative process after going to Sacramento last year to testify in favor of a bill to expand charter schools. A state Senate committee summarily dismissed the bill. “I still have scars from that experience,” he said.

Opposition to his cause comes from one of the most formidable groups around, the public school lobby. Teachers unions worry they will lose bargaining rights at charter schools, although now that Hastings is on the verge of qualifying his initiative for the ballot, lobbyists for teachers are trying to negotiate a truce with him in the Legislature.

“Initiatives are a bad way to make public policy on complex issues,” said Bob Cherry, spokesman for the California Teachers Assn., which probably would mount a campaign against Hastings’ initiative. “They focus on panaceas or simple solutions that aren’t representative of the best interests of the public and quite frankly the kids.”

That’s not to say teachers are above resorting to the ballot. In 1988, the California Teachers Union was a sponsor of one of the most far-reaching initiatives--Proposition 98--which passed with 50.7% of the vote and established a complex school funding system that guarantees public schools almost 40% of the state budget.

Effective Calling Card

In his business life, Hastings avoided the spotlight. He doesn’t much like it now. But with his Silicon Valley ties and willingness to spend his money on education--an issue every candidate is talking about this year--he has become a very influential man very fast.

Gov. Pete Wilson has granted him audiences and endorsed his proposal. Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the likely Republican gubernatorial nominee, and Rep. Jane Harman, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, have endorsed it as well.

Hastings may be a political neophyte. But his calling card is a coalition called Technology Network, a group of representatives from 100 of the country’s top high-tech firms. The organization has made education reform one of its main goals.

“He didn’t know about initiatives,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican advisor to TechNet and a former top aide to Wilson. “I tried to give him an idea of how much it would cost to get one passed. In the most extreme cases, you’re looking at tens of millions.” Hastings blanched a little, Schnur said--and “asked me to talk about the legislative strategy again.”

After Hastings heard Clinton’s speech, he struck up a conversation with Don Shalvey, a booster of charter schools and superintendent of schools in San Carlos, a suburb south of San Francisco. Perhaps, Hastings said, they could work together.

“I walked away not thinking much about it, that it was one more good idea that wouldn’t happen,” Shalvey recalled.

But Hastings had the money to get an initiative on the ballot. Shalvey could give it credibility. Seeing what he considered a chance to help public schools, Shalvey signed on, and their political adventure began.

First stop, at Schnur’s suggestion, was the Sacramento office of Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, perhaps the most influential political law firm in the capital.

The firm is small, 17 lawyers and lobbyists. But it counts as clients some of the most powerful players in the state--Wilson, the state GOP, ARCO and Wells Fargo among them. The firm has helped write or defeat 41 initiatives since 1990.

Pointers for Proposals

Hastings wanted advice about getting a winning initiative on the ballot. Steve Merksamer, who heads the capital office, was chief of staff to Gov. George Deukmejian and is a top advisor to Lungren’s gubernatorial campaign. Merksamer’s advice: Pare down the complex proposal.

“He said, ‘You can go for the long bomb, and maybe get a touchdown. But smart guys go for the 40-yard pass. That builds momentum. You do the rest later,’ ” Hastings recalled.

The job of writing the initiative fell primarily to Gene Erbin, who spent nine years as counsel to the Assembly Judiciary Committee before joining Nielsen, Merksamer.

The key to writing an initiative, said Erbin, is to understand that it’s not merely a law. It’s also a political document. Voters will read it. So the proposal can’t be too confusing.

Enter consultant Claussen, whose company, Goddard, Claussen/First Tuesday has a reputation for killing initiatives aimed at business. Goddard, Claussen gained national notoriety for its “Harry and Louise” ads. Produced for health insurance companies, the TV spots of a couple discussing the complexities of the Clinton health care plan have been credited with derailing the project.

“He understands the ‘no’ side. Hopefully, he knows how to inoculate a yes-campaign,” Hastings said, explaining his decision to hire Claussen.

Claussen began by perusing the draft, looking for flaws. “Give me a mouse hole and I can drive a Mack truck through it by the end of the campaign,” he said.

Claussen wanted Hastings to drop provisions that would require government to spend money to build charter schools. Opponents would claim that the initiative would cost too much. Mention of funding, therefore, is out.

To guard against opponents’ potential charge that charter schools could be opened by extremists, the measure says such schools cannot “teach hate.” To guard against attacks that unqualified teachers will be hired, the initiative requires that instructors pass competency tests. And so on.

Altogether, Erbin and other lawyers at the firm produced 28 drafts, a not atypical number. By February, the Charter Public Schools Act of 1998 was ready to “hit the streets.” Circulators set out to persuade 1.2 million voters to sign the petitions--and petition circulation firms almost never fail to get the signatures, if the sponsors have enough money.

“We’re not in the business of losing clients,” said Angelo Paparella, president of Progressive Campaigns, the Santa Monica-based firm that Hastings chose.

Use as Political Leverage

Of the four major petition circulation firms in California, Progressive has been the most aggressive in recent years. The firm helped qualify measures to restrict health care corporations in 1994 and 1996--which Goddard, Claussen helped defeat. In 1996, the firm placed on the ballot the measure that legalized marijuana for medicinal use. Since then, it has circulated medical marijuana measures in six states, plus Washington, D.C.

Progressive could be responsible for qualifying as many as five initiatives this November, including one to increase tobacco taxes by 50 cents per pack to fund early childhood education programs. If that measure makes it onto the ballot, Nielsen, Merksamer, which counts tobacco firms as its clients, probably would join the effort to defeat it.

On a recent Friday afternoon, one of Paparella’s petitioners, Cameron Maury, 31, was out at the Lucky store at Ocean Park and Lincoln in Santa Monica. He wore jeans, soft-soled shoes, a T-shirt, rings in each ear, a day’s growth of beard and a baseball cap.

A veteran of petition drives as far away as Alaska, Maury held clipboards with four petitions. He gets $1 per name for charter schools, 35 cents for the one to ban the sale of horse meat. As the shoppers passed, the patter, familiar to anyone who happens by a circulator, began:

“This is an initiative to improve public schools. Give teachers and parents more control. Let me show you real quick. This one is to raise tobacco taxes by 50 cents for prenatal programs and education. This one is term limits. Throw the bums out. And this is to protect the horses from being slaughtered for human consumption.”

A woman stomped off at the mention of the tobacco tax. “Must be a smoker,” he said with a shrug. “This is not a job for someone who can’t handle rejection.”

Maury’s style was chatty, only slightly pushy. Maria Donaldson of Venice stopped to sign all four. She liked the charter schools idea most of all. Her teenage son stood nearby, and she bemoaned how the school doesn’t do enough to stop him from ditching class.

“Having more choice, that’s important. They never tell you there are choices,” she said.

Within an hour, Maury persuaded maybe 50 people to stop and sign. Not bad. “I love initiatives. Great stuff,” Maury said. “I love grass-roots politics.”

For all the writing, polling and consulting, Hastings may not, in the end, place his initiative on the ballot, even assuming Progressive gathers the requisite signatures. In a common tactic, Hastings is using the threat of the initiative as leverage. He hopes he can convince charter school critics to agree to legislation that would accomplish what he wants. Talks have begun. Erbin said Wednesday that chances of an accord are 50-50.

“We want to see this worked out in the legislative process,” said Cherry, the California Teachers Union spokesman. “Everybody would be far better served by that.”

Initiatives often are used as threats. This year, unions went so far as to gather enough signatures for one to counter Proposition 226, the measure that would require unions to get members’ approval before using their dues for political purposes. In the end, however, labor organizations opted against placing their measure on the ballot, after business groups that might have supported Proposition 226 decided to remain neutral.

Hastings’ interest in avoiding a campaign is clear: A winning campaign would cost $15 million, two-thirds of which would be spent on radio and television ads, Claussen figures.

Even at that price, initiatives are never a sure bet. Most that lose have strong organized opposition. The public school lobby has proved many times that it is capable of such a campaign. A loss at the polls would allow skeptics of charter schools to argue that the voters had spoken, making it unlikely that the Legislature would tackle the charter school issue for years.

Still, if no deal is struck soon, Hastings will submit the signatures and the public brawl will begin.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

California Initiatives, by the Numbers

Here are some sample figures related to the skyrocketing costs of running a California initiative campaign:

A few hundred thousand to several million dollars: Cost of a statewide campaign.

$3 million to $5 million: Amount that a top consulting firm can make for its role.

$40,000 to $60,000: Cost of producing a typical initiative television commercial.

$25 million: Highest amount spent on broadcast advertising by the supporters or opponents on an initiative, with three-fourths of that going to television.

$141,274,345: Campaign contributions to qualify, support or oppose the 27 measures on the primary and general election ballots in 1996.

$93 million: Money raised in connection with 1996 propositions that cannot be linked with the specific measure that the contributor supported or opposed.

$45 million: Record amount spent in 1996 in the election battle over Prop. 211, a measure that would have made it easier to bring lawsuits against publicly traded corporations over stock fraud.

1996 initiative campaign contributions that cannot be linked to specific propositions: 66%

33%

Source: Secretary of state; Times files