COMMUNITY VOICES: Jim Brunelle

Secretary of state right to give Adams' petitions benefit of doubt

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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The democratic process got a nudge forward in Augusta last week.

Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap made the right decision in giving the go-ahead to a referendum on a so-called Taxpayer's Bill of Rights proposal, even though organizers of the initiative may not have turned in a sufficient number of valid signatures to meet the deadline last fall.

Dunlap made the right call, not because the proposal is a good idea - it's perfectly awful - but because it was the fair thing to do, fair to the organizers who put a lot of hard work into the drive and to Maine voters in general.

Here's what happened: Tax activist Mary Adams and her followers submitted 54,000 signatures to the state on Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, about 3,500 more than needed to get the measure on the ballot this year.

Sometime over that weekend they discovered an extra box of petitions, evidently left behind by accident, containing another 4,000 signatures. They delivered these to the State House first thing the following Monday, Oct. 24, three days past the statutory cutoff date.

That's what triggered the numbers game. In reviewing all the signatures submitted, the state rejected more than 6,500 as invalid for one reason or another.

That left about 51,600 valid names, comfortably more than the 50,500 needed to send the proposal to referendum. Comfortable, that is, as long as the critical block of petitions that was submitted late is included in the validation process.

Some opponents of the referendum proposal, like Democratic Sen. Ethan Strimling of Portland, say Dunlap should have discounted the extra petitions.

But the secretary of state says he was unwilling to penalize petition circulators over "a stupid mistake" and to scuttle the referendum on a technicality.

Furthermore, he points out, the courts have said repeatedly that there must be flexibility in the rules applying to citizen initiatives so as not to thwart a clear expression of public will.

Opponents of the "bill of rights" idea may yet mount a court challenge to Dunlap's certification of the referendum, but that would be a mistake.

For one thing, they would likely fail - and in doing so would weaken their moral standing, not to mention popular support, in any subsequent debate over the issue. Besides, legal hairsplitting is no way to win a philosophical argument.

It seems pretty obvious that Adams and her group were not trying to pull off some sort of last-minute ploy to put a failed petition drive over the top.

According to Dunlap, the overdue petitions had "unimpeachably" been circulated, notarized and certified by municipal officials before the deadline.

The failure to submit all the gathered signatures on schedule was an oversight, pure and simple, and should not be used to prevent voters from having their say on this issue, even if it is a lousy idea.

Incidentally, over the years Maine voters have shown themselves perfectly capable of sorting out and dumping many a lousy referendum idea, no matter how superficially attractive.

The most recent example occurred in November 2004, when voters rejected Carol Palesky's local property tax cap proposal by more than a 3-2 margin. They concluded, correctly, that it would have resulted in considerable fiscal wreckage at both the municipal and state levels of government.

The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights represents a slight variation on the Palesky initiative and holds all the same populist anti-tax appeal.

Based on law adopted - although later backed away from - in Colorado, it would place severe restrictions on all government spending, require supermajority voter approval of any tax increases and automatically refund most surplus revenues to voters.

Adams' petition drive got a lot of help from the governor and legislative leaders, who failed to follow up on the Palesky defeat by tackling real tax reform in a big way.

True, they did pass a tax package, popularly known as LD 1, that increased state aid for public schools, broadened the circuit breaker and homestead exemption programs and mandated more efficient municipal spending practices to take the pressure off local property tax rates.

But this was not the sort of comprehensive restructuring of tax policies that most people hoped for to bring relief to the most unfairly and harmfully taxed of Mainers.

If the mischievously radical Adams referendum is approved later this year, it won't be due to any failure of the democratic process.

Rather, it will represent the failure of the state's political leaders to come up with a better reform proposal when they had the chance.

Jim Brunelle comments on politics and other issues for the Portland Press Herald. He can be contacted at:

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