Suit challenges spending cap petitions

AUGUSTA — A Bowdoinham woman who opposes a proposed spending cap referendum is asking a Superior Court judge to derail the ballot question, arguing that organizers failed to meet the state's deadline for filing a petition. The lawsuit, filed Friday in Kennebec County Superior Court by Kathleen McGee, asserts that Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap wrongly concluded Feb. 21 that referendum supporters collected enough valid signatures to force a public vote on their so-called taxpayer bill of rights.

The suit is the most important move to date in an ongoing fight over Dunlap's decision. Last week, state Sen. Ethan Strimling, D-Portland, requested a legal opinion on Dunlap's ruling from the Maine Attorney General's Office, but McGee has taken the issue a step further.

The proposed referendum would limit spending increases at all levels of government within the state. At the state level, for example, growth would be linked to inflation and population increases.

The proposal also would make it harder to raise taxes and fees. Increases would require two-thirds votes by the appropriate governing body, such as the Legislature for state taxes, followed by majority approval by voters.

In his decision on the petition signatures, Dunlap found that 51,611 of the 58,151 names submitted by organizers were valid. That exceeded the 50,519 required by the state constitution, so Dunlap ruled that organizer Mary Adams of Garland and her allies had enough support to pursue a referendum.

The Legislature gets first crack at initiated bills such as this one, but lawmakers normally refuse to enact them, opting instead to send them to voters. In this case, a statewide referendum will be held June 13 or Nov. 7, unless McGee can persuade a judge to keep the question off the ballot.

McGee filed suit because Adams submitted most, but not all, of her petitions to Dunlap's office by the Oct. 21 deadline set by state law. The initial batch of petitions filed Oct. 21 contained 54,127 names. A final box filed Oct. 24 contained another 4,024 names.

Dunlap's office disqualified thousands of signatures for various reasons, including the fact that some of them were duplicates. As a result, he said, there weren't enough valid signatures in the first batch alone to put organizers over the top.

In his ruling, Dunlap wrote that the late petitions "were ready to be filed but were inadvertently omitted" when referendum organizers submitted the bulk of their petitions Oct. 21. Dunlap has said he accepted the last box of petitions Oct. 24 because those petitions were circulated, signed and certified by municipal officials before the deadline.

"I think we took a prudent step to accept them," Dunlap said Monday. He says the courts have ruled in the past that the laws governing initiatives should be "liberally construed" to protect the public's right to pass laws at the ballot box. But he also said it's valid "to ask whether or not we made the right decision."

In her lawsuit, McGee alleges that Dunlap erred because the law that sets a filing deadline "unambiguously confers no discretion on the secretary of state." The suit says the last box of petitions was filed too late to be counted, so organizers did not submit enough valid signatures to force a referendum.

"The statute is very, very clear," McGee said Monday. Organizers "knew walking in exactly what the deadlines were," she said, and ignoring that in this case could "corrupt and subvert" the referendum process.

Adams argues that the state constitution sets a much later filing deadline than state law does, so if the two deadlines conflict, the constitutional deadline takes precedence.

"Those statutes have to conform to the constitution," Adams said Monday, because the constitution is "the backbone" of the state's legal system. As a result, Adams predicted, "Everything looks like it's set for a good decision upholding the secretary of state."

McGee, a liberal activist who has been affiliated in the past with the Maine People's Alliance and the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund, has legal standing to challenge the ruling, according to her lawyers and Doug Dunbar, a spokesman for the secretary of state.

Dunbar and lawyer Gerald Petruccelli of Portland, whose firm represents McGee, agreed Monday that state law allows any registered voter to challenge a decision that paves the way for a state referendum on a citizen-initiated bill.

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Should the taxpayer bill of rights be allowed on the ballot?

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