Backers of School Construction Measure Launch TV Ad Blitz

Promoters of a potential school construction initiative are launching a television ad blitz today as part of a high-cost effort to get the measure on the November ballot, even as they battle a lawsuit that could stall their campaign.

The initiative’s backers hope to place a retooled measure on the November ballot, having failed to win passage last month of Proposition 26, which would have allowed voters to approve local school bonds by a simple majority, rather than the current two-thirds margin.

On Tuesday, backers of the renewed effort, including business leaders and educators, blasted a lawsuit filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. as a stall tactic intended to keep the measure off the November ballot.

The taxpayers association filed the suit last week in Sacramento County Superior Court, arguing that the summary of the new initiative is misleading because a single word has been omitted from a sentence.

The failed March measure stated that local school bonds could be passed with majority “voter” approval, according to the taxpayers association. In the summary for the new initiative, the word “voter” has been eliminated from a similar phrase.

“You have a very basic structural element that is missing from the description, and that is who it is that votes,” said Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. “We believe it’s a key element that has been changed.”

Initiative backers call the lawsuit a “meritless” attempt to hold up their petition drive. They must collect more than a million signatures by May 5 for the initiative to get on the ballot.

“It’s an effort on their part to delay the circulation of petitions which at this point would be critical to our effort because we have so little time to gather the necessary number of signatures,” said Bill Hauck, president of the California Business Roundtable.

Not so, countered Vosburgh, who noted that his group filed its suit within days of the initiative’s summary and title being released by Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer’s office.

“We didn’t wait until they had spent weeks circulating their petitions [to file suit],” Vosburgh said.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Monday in Sacramento.

A television ad campaign promoting the petition drive, meanwhile, gets underway today in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego. The ads are part of what backers of the measure say will be a $5-million signature-gathering effort. One commercial begins with a woman dropping her children off at school and shows the children scampering off to temporary classrooms.

“Our kids shouldn’t have trailers for classrooms,” the woman says in the commercial. “You know, there’s a petition we can sign that will help us build better schools and put tough rules in place to make sure the money goes to classrooms, not bureaucracy.”

Backed by Gov. Gray Davis, business leaders who bankrolled the failed attempt in March announced their intentions earlier this month to place a new version on the November ballot that would reduce the vote needed for local construction bonds from the current two-thirds majority to 55%. Last month’s Proposition 26 had aimed for 50%.

Davis was criticized for not throwing his political weight behind Proposition 26, which lost by fewer than 165,000 votes. The governor has vowed to actively support the new initiative.

The taxpayers association, which spent less than $1 million to run ads opposing Proposition 26, has described the latest effort as a ludicrous attempt to raise taxes at a time when the state is swimming in billions of surplus dollars.

But Hauck countered: “We need to build schools to educate young people and we need to fix schools that need fixing. To not do so would be an all-around disaster.”