Are petition drives clogging the ballot or celebrating democracy?

KANSAS CITY, Mo. Kansas City’s voters will have a busy 2016. They’ll help pick a president, members of Congress, state legislators and a new governor.

But voting for people isn’t the only task they’ll face. Voters are likely to decide important issues in 2016 too, such as extending the city’s 1 percent earnings tax. They may face decisions on a new airport, a downtown convention hotel, even changes to the minimum wage.

And more: Statewide plebiscites are possible on legal marijuana, campaign finance rules, taxes, voting rights, tobacco taxes, term limits, a jobs program, even a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing parents the right to discipline their children without fear of legal interference.

All of those choices are related to one of the most fiercely guarded tools of local and state democracy: initiative and referendum petitions. The right to gather signatures to force public votes on important issues is enshrined in Kansas City’s charter, and Missouri law.

Now some politicians wonder whether that right needs to be adjusted. Government by plebiscite, some suggest, may be turning representative democracy on its head.

“We need to make the bar high to get something on the ballot,” said Kansas City Councilwoman Jolie Justus, who worked on petition-related issues as a member of the Missouri General Assembly.

Addressing perceived problems with the petition process is difficult because the challenges are different at the state and local level. Although local petitions are too easy, some critics say, statewide petitions may be too tough.

Missouri requires nearly 100,000 signatures from varied locations to put a proposed law on the ballot. Constitutional amendments are even harder, requiring more than 150,000 valid signees.

“It is very easy to submit a petition to our office, but very difficult to actually get the issue on the ballot,” noted Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander.

As a result, some fear the statewide process is only truly available to wealthy activists and special interest groups with enough resources to gather the signatures.

“You start seeing folks who try to do an end run around the legislative process,” Justus said.

Of course, the whole point of initiative and referendum petitions is to circumvent legislators. The idea for such a process grew from electoral reforms passed in California and other states in the early 1900s.

The framework made its way to Missouri a few years later, and citizens have fought for it ever since.

“When you have a government like we have, it’s very important,” said Dan Coffey, an activist involved in several recent Kansas City petition drives. “It’s very much what the public wants.”

Talk of revisiting Kansas City’s petition process began this summer, prompted by the extraordinarily poor turnout in the mayoral election. The city’s requirement for petition signatures is based on that turnout.

About 34,000 votes were cast for Mayor Sly James and his opponent. That means a mere 1,700 valid signatures can put proposed city ordinances before voters, while twice that number can force a public referendum on many City Council decisions from hotel financing to transportation plans to wage requirements.

That makes bypassing elected officials pretty simple. Herb Kohn, a Kansas City lawyer and onetime adviser to Mayor Kay Barnes, called the current petition process “ridiculously easy.”

Former Kansas City councilman Jim Rowland once tried to toughen the city’s petition signature requirements.

“If the threshold becomes lower and lower, you do start to cross that divide to legislating by special interest, or government by referendum,” he said earlier this month.

But public votes aren’t the only concern. Even the threat of a petition can influence public policy.

The controversial minimum wage increase in Kansas City was prompted by a petition drive. The city’s voters are guaranteed a role in the airport decision because of a petition effort. Petitions are now being gathered to put the downtown hotel to a vote, although the legality of that effort is unclear.

Other council decisions on development, transportation, public safety may face similar electoral scrutiny.

The lower petition threshold has worried elected officials for months.

“I think that there is always going to be something, and some group of people, who are against something,” Mayor James said this summer. “If you only have to gather a thousand petitions or signatures in order to get it on the ballot, we’re going to see more and more of those.”

Changing the requirements for Kansas City’s initiative and referendum petitions, or Missouri’s, would be extraordinarily difficult. Both would require voter approval, and the electorate has shown extreme reluctance to endorse any procedure limiting their ability to circumvent their elected leadership.

In the 2000s angry at the repeated petition drives launched by transit enthusiast Clay Chastain the Kansas City Council tried to stiffen petition requirements, including a charter change requiring petition signatures to be gathered across several council districts. Petitions would also have to be submitted to the city’s legal department for review before going to voters.

The changes failed. Voters “did not want to do away with referendum or initiative, and they did not want to make it more difficult,” Kohn recalled.

Clinton Adams, a lawyer who has worked on the minimum wage increase and other public efforts, said voters want to protect their opportunity to make laws on their own.

“It gives the people a chance,” he said, “if you have the passion, the commitment and the ability to persuade your peers.”

Justus proposed changes to the state’s petition framework when she served in the Missouri General Assembly. Her modest reforms were opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative businessman Rex Sinquefield, she recalled one of the rare times the pair agreed on an issue.

Initiative petition rights aren’t limited to Kansas City. Jackson County, for example, offers a petition threshold similar to Kansas City’s 5 percent of the votes cast for county executive in the last election.

But because the last county executive campaign took place in November 2014 a much higher turnout election a petition committee needs roughly 6,800 valid signatures to put something on the countywide ballot, not the 1,700 required in Kansas City. Twice as many signatures would be needed to force a referendum on ordinances approved by the county Legislature.

Kansas communities can also initiate laws by petition, but many more signatures are required. In larger cities, the threshold is 25 percent of all voters in the previous city election.

But that higher bar hasn’t stopped some petitioners. In Wichita this year, enough petition signatures were submitted to force a controversial public vote in April on decriminalizing marijuana possession.

Kansas has no referendum or initiative petition process for statewide issues.

Missouri does. The secretary of state’s office has approved more than 30 petitions for statewide circulation so far this year, and the number is expected to climb.

But not all of those issues will end up on the ballot. Many petitions are repetitive, and some will lack the gathering muscle to obtain the needed signatures.

Indeed, most serious Missouri petition efforts are highly organized and expensive endeavors. In 2010, a Sinquefield-backed committee paid a California company more than $800,000 to gather petition signatures for a measure he wanted on that year’s ballot.

The issue? The 1 percent earnings tax in Kansas City and St. Louis. Sinquefield wanted residents in both cities to have the chance to consider those taxes at the ballot box every five years.

There were enough signatures, and the proposal was submitted to the state’s voters. They approved it, which is why Kansas Citians must vote on the levy next spring.

Those experiences suggest the right to petition is secure in the state and city, at least for now.

“It’s not fun,” Coffey said, but it can be “the only way you have to try to get what’s in the best interest of the public.”

(c)2015 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)

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