Ballot Could be Littered with Pocketbook Votes (State House News Service)

By STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE Staff
 
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, AUG. 5, 2009 -Voters beset by the worst recession in decades and smacked with a variety of new taxes are turning to the 2010 ballot for several different ways to reverse Beacon Hill wallet grabs measures that, if successful, would leave state government gasping for funds.
 
Proposed questions filed by Wednesday's deadline and with a shot at making the November 2010 ballot include a safeguard for local aid to cities and towns, the lifting of state caps on charter schools, sales tax rollbacks, eliminated turnpike tolls, and a repeal of the recently enacted alcohol sales tax. Another topic mired in fiscal complexities  guaranteed access to quality health care was also filed in the form of a constitutional amendment.
 
Questions were also filed to authorize secret ballots for the election of the House Speaker and Senate President, to mandate "whale-safe" fishing practices, prohibiting the commercial harvesting of wood in land owned by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, banning the use of state funds for energy projects that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, limiting carbon emissions, legalizing and taxing Internet poker, and a petition to guarantee human rights in Massachusetts should the country ever enter into a global federal union. 
 
The pocketbook-issue pattern of the changes to state law pushed by a variety of interest groups reflects larger discontent with the state?s economic and jobs picture and government?s reaction to the recession. Unemployment here hit 8.6 percent in June and the state is down more than 100,000 jobs from a year ago. Taxes and fees have surged, while local aid, health care programs, and a broad menu of other popular state services have seen cuts.
 
Unlike the most recent round of ballot questions, which sought to change or reverse long-standing state government policies in areas like marijuana possession and dog racing, the slate of proposals aimed at the 2010 ballot are largely reactionary or complementary measures to recent Beacon Hill developments, including elevated tax rates, a push from Gov. Deval Patrick toward more charter schools, and deep slices into municipal funding.
 
Ballot questions can also have implications for campaigns for public office since candidates often are forced to pick sides on issues that are able to excite or depress turnout.
 
The constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to quality health care for every resident of Massachusetts was filed by Harold Hubschman and Democratic Party activist Lesley Phillips, who chairs the Ward 6 Democratic Committee in Cambridge.  The Legislature turned down a recent attempt to put advance a similar constitutional amendment, saying they wanted to give their 2006 universal health care law time to work
 
Said Hubschman, who runs a company that specializes in the signature gathering required for ballot campaigns, "You have a right to vote. You have a right to send your kids to school. Those are basic rights. A society as wealthy as ours should have a right to health care as well."
 
The proposed laws that came in under the wire Wednesday face an arduous path - one that has derailed many campaigns - to the 2010 statewide election. If Coakley determines an initiative meets constitutional requirements, it moves next to Secretary of State William Galvin, who issues blank petitions for the questions. Then proponents must collect 66,593 voter signatures and file them with local election officials by late November, and then Galvin by the first Wednesday in December.
 
If the signatures meet the threshold, the initiatives arrive in the Legislature next January, where lawmakers can vote them into law, offer a substitute, or ignore them. Unless lawmakers have enacted the initiative before the first Wednesday in May, advocates have to collect another 11,099 signatures by early July. Once that hurdle is cleared, the initiative and any legislative substitute are placed on the November 2010 ballot.
 
Constitutional amendments face even deeper chasms to the ballot, requiring approval from 25 percent of lawmakers in two successive sessions, and could not appear on the ballot until 2012. One constitutional amendment not filed at the deadline: term limits for lawmakers. Although the GOP considered such a proposal, the party is completely focused on getting candidates elected,? according to a spokeswoman.
 
One group filed petitions to slice the state sales tax from its new, 6.25 percent rate to any one of four options: 5 percent, 4 percent, 3 percent or 2 percent. Planning to distribute petitions online and lobby lawmakers from high-impact districts, a group called Citizens Against Road Tolls (CART) wants to strip all tolls from the Pike by 2012, a plan that would ease traveling costs for thousands while putting a new fiscal burden on the state.
 
Citizens looking to protect local aid from budget cuts are pushing an initiative petition that would mandate the total local aid allocation never fall as a percentage of the overall budget. The measure would grant a level of relative protection to the municipal assistance not enjoyed by other spending areas. 

"If for example, the current year's proposed state budget without local aid is 2% lower than the prior year's budget without the local aid portion, then local aid in the current year's budget can only be decreased by 2% relative to the local aid amount in the previous year's budget," reads the submission.
 
The charter school measure would give preference for new charters to applications in districts at or below the statewide average on MCAS performance, require a state board to approve new charters in the lowest performing districts, allow one board of trustees to manage more than one charter school, and protect the charter school funding formula as it is presently written, according to the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association.  
 
Two versions of charter school petition language were filed with Coakley's office just before noon.  Among the signers: former top state education official James Peyser, former Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy, Weld administration budget chief Peter Nessen, Paul Sagan of Akamai Technologies, former MassINC director Tripp Jones, former Boston City Councilor Tom Keane, and Bill Edgerly, the former State Street Corporation executive who helped craft the 1993 education reform law. 

"The intent is to have something ready in case the Legislature does nothing," said Dom Slowey, a consultant, petition signer and spokesperson for the association.  "We still support the governor's legislation.  We're still going to work with the Legislature to pass something so that we can expand charters across the state, especially in areas where the doors are closed to new charters now." 
 
While charters have not hit the current caps on the numbers of Commonwealth and Horace Mann charter schools, many urban areas of Massachusetts have hit a third funding-related cap, which means new charters are not possible currently in Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, Fall River, and Springfield, Slowey said.
 
The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association said Wednesday that lifting all caps on charter schools "would resegregate our public education system, worsening the already wide achievement gap."   
 
In a statement released after petitioners the proposal was filed, Anne Wass said Commonwealth charter schools, the most popular kind, "enroll a much smaller percentage of low-income, special needs and English language learner students than the districts in which they are located.  With no limit on the number of charter schools, public education would no longer provide students with an equal opportunity to succeed, but instead would lead to an even greater divide between the ?haves? and ?have nots?."  
 
Wass added that under the current funding system, local school districts lose hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools each year, which hurts their capacity to provide needed services to students in the regular public schools."  
 
Slowey said he expected teacher unions to raise fiscal issues in their push against the ballot proposal, but noted parents pay the income, sales and property taxes that pay for school operations.  
 
"Their main argument is going to be about money because when the child leaves so does the money," Slowey said.  "In reality it shouldn't be the issue because it's not their money to begin with, it's the parents'."
 
Chris Anderson, president of the Mass High Tech Council and former state Board of Education chairman, said the council that if the Legislature passes Gov. Deval Patrick's charter school expansion bill, "I don?t see the need to pursue the ballot initiative in the next year."  For now though, Anderson's group is for the ballot plan and he hopes its presence will pressure the Legislature to act this fall on a charter school bill and seize available federal funds.
 
"We're involved in it because we're trying to stem the sort of persistent problems in underperforming districts," Anderson said. "We're convinced that charters are a key part of the solution." 
 
Nelson Smith, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told the News Service in a recent interview that President Barack Obama's support of charter schools and competition for billions of dollars in new federal funds had already led to more charter-school friendly policies in eight states. 
 
In Massachusetts, Slowey said, charter school proponents counter among their big supporters Reps. James Vallee, Eugene O'Flaherty and Patricia Haddad in the House and Sens. Jack Hart, Marian Walsh and Anthony Petruccelli.
 
Randy Castonguay, state director for the Poker Players Alliance, said Massachusetts should capitalize on Internet poker by legalizing, regulating and taxing it. "Right now all the money's going offshore," he told the News Service. 

Another petition filed near the deadline would require commercial fishing to be "whale-safe," according to the lead sponsor, Richard Max Strahan, a Cambridge resident. "The fishing industry has escaped environmental review for the last 60 years," he told the News Service in a phone interview. "In fact, the situation's getting worse." Strahan said the proposal would ban gill nets and prohibit the entanglement of a whale or a sea turtle.
 
The petition would require the secretary of energy and environmental affairs annually to make a scientific determination that no member of any biological species of Whale and/or Sea Turtle will likely become entangled, killed, injured, or otherwise taken by any commercial fishing in state coastal waters. Until that determination is made, the proposal reads, the state may not license the use of fishing gear for commercial purposes.
 
 END
 08/05/2009