Petition Firms Desperately Seeking to Sign Circulators Up

The fuel for California’s revved-up initiative process has long been a ready supply of unskilled, unemployed workers eager to spend hot Saturdays in front of the grocery store collecting petition signatures for up to $2 apiece.

But now, in a sign of the hot economy, that labor force has been reduced to a trickle, sending waves of panic through firms trying to get enough signatures by the end of August to gain a berth on the March 2000 primary ballot.

“I guess I should’ve seen it coming . . . but I didn’t,” said Fred Kimball, president of Kimball Petition Management. “We’re beating our heads up against the wall trying to get enough signatures.”

These days, running an initiative campaign is similar to building a house: The petition sponsors hire a campaign consultant, who subcontracts with a petition circulation firm, which in turn subcontracts with “coordinators” who procure the laborers--in this case signature gatherers.

Kimball, whose company is one of the initiative industry pioneers, is tens of thousands of signatures short of his goal: 1 million names in favor of putting on the ballot a measure that would make it easier to pass local school bonds.

Previously, every newspaper ad for signature gatherers would yield at least 15 people for training, but Kimball said that this summer he has been lucky to get three per ad.

In a textbook lesson of supply and demand, the price paid per signature has also jumped--from 40 cents last month to $1 last week. Next week, sponsors of a new initiative on Indian gaming are expected to make a last-minute run at qualifying it, offering as much as $2 per John Hancock.

Not everyone views the dearth of signature gatherers as a tragedy. State Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) has legislation pending to require gatherers to tell potential signers whether they are volunteering or being paid to collect names.

Schiff said in a statement that his measure (AB 1219) would “strike squarely at one of the most troubling aspects of the state’s initiative process: the growth of paid signature gatherers.”

Eileen Ray, who became a coordinator in 1984 to help qualify the initiative that created the California Lottery, said she has never had to scramble for workers as much as this year.

Her labor pool statewide is about 350 now, a third its usual strength. “I would take everybody who walks in the door,” Ray said.

There will always be a core group of permanent petitioners who like the work and are good enough at it to make a decent salary, said Jim Shultz, author of “The Initiative Cookbook.” But for people in the larger group, who move in and out of the job depending on their other employment options, it’s Economics 101, he said.

“If someone can make $7 an hour running a photocopier at Kinko’s, they might just decide that is a better deal than hanging out in front of Kmart hawking an initiative petition,” Shultz said.

Ray recruited heavily last week in anticipation of the initiative to legalize gambling on Indian reservations, which is a hedge against a court challenge to Proposition 5, last year’s initiative to allow expansion of Indian gaming. She has been bringing people in from out of state--Portland, Ore.; Spokane; even Boston--an outreach made legal just last January by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Michael Arno, whose Rancho Cordova, Calif., consulting firm is handling the gaming initiative, said that by paying more he hopes to be able to find at least 500 people and get them to work longer hours.

“In the early ‘80s, when unemployment was 13%, we were getting college professors to gather signatures,” he said. “Now there are more initiatives and . . . anyone that wants a better job than petitioning can get one.”

Among the other initiatives in the race for March qualification is one freezing legislators’ pay and another sponsored by a chain of convenience markets to undo last year’s Proposition 10, which taxes cigarettes to fund preschool programs.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, emboldened by his June 1998 victory with the anti-bilingual education Proposition 227, is trying for another initiative, this time to restrict political campaigns by limiting contributions.

Initiative sponsors share another concern: Because California has moved its primary from June to March next year, prime time for politicking will land right around the holidays.

“Those lovely months of November and December,” joked political consultant Gale Kaufman, who is running the campaign to reduce the vote requirement for passage of local school bond measures from two-thirds to a simple majority.

Voters are not going to want to hear from campaigns then, Kaufman said, and even the ready army of volunteers that one of the initiative’s sponsors--the California Teachers Assn.--has come to depend on will be busy with family and vacations.