The Money Talks

Lots of people plunk down a buck every week for a longshot chance at winning a lottery jackpot. Similarly, Community Memorial Hospital has spent more than $520,000 so far on its campaign to siphon $260 million in tobacco settlement money out of Ventura County’s government coffers and into its own private pockets.

According to a financial report filed last week, the private nonprofit hospital has spent $192,967 on consulting fees, $191,743 on petition drives, $100,761 on legal fees, $30,840 on advertising and $4,130 on printing and postage.

Too bad all that wasn’t spent on health care.

Too bad, too, that because county officials are prohibited by law from using public resources to lobby against the initiative, it’s possible that the hospital’s brazen act of piracy might actually fool enough voters to pass in November. Fortunately, a coalition of private groups stepped forward last week to speak out loudly against it.

Already the county has been forced to spend thousands to contest the legality of the initiative, which would transfer the county’s share of a legal settlement with the tobacco industry to Community Memorial and six other private hospitals. The publicly owned Ventura County Medical Center, which provides far more health care to the poor than the other seven hospitals combined, wouldn’t receive a dime.

The Board of Supervisors at first refused to place the measure on the ballot, arguing that it would represent an illegal gift of public funds, that it would create an illegal commission to regulate how the money is spent and that it would interfere with the county budget process. But late last month, a Superior Court judge ordered the measure to be placed on the ballot. Although he conceded that the county’s arguments “have created in this court’s mind serious or grave doubts as to the legality of the initiative,” he declined to make that determination until after voters have had their say.

And so many more dollars--public and private--will be spent on a vigorous and costly campaign rather than on health care.

The Board of Supervisors invited this challenge by initially planning to use a small part of the money for purposes other than health care. That opened the door for Community Memorial’s don’t-trust-government message, which quickly attracted enough petition signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The board has since committed to spend the windfall entirely on anti-smoking and other health programs. That is exactly how this money should be spent--but because it is public money it should be used for public health programs, under full public scrutiny and accountability.

The whole expensive, wasteful affair is one more example of how the ballot initiative system, with its growing legion of specialist lawyers, consultants and mercenary signature-gatherers, is warping government in California and circumventing the concept of representative government.

Entire books have been written about the problem. In the most recent, “Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money,” veteran political journalist David S. Broder declares that the initiative process “has given the United States something that seems unthinkable--not a government of laws but laws without government.”

We believe in representative democracy. Decisions such as how to spend the county’s share of the tobacco settlement should be made by public officials who are duly elected by and accountable to the voting public. If their decisions are bad ones, the voters should toss those representatives out of office and elect better ones.

But if voters continue to take important decisions out of the hands of their elected decision-makers, the inevitable result will be chaos.