Initiative Process Remains Friendly

Sat., Oct. 31, 1998

By Doug Floyd dougf@spokesman.com

A two-year-old effort to streamline the Spokane City Charter has produced three amendments for voters to decide on Tuesday. All have been carefully thought out and deserve voter approval.

Two are easy calls. By permitting the City Council to meet less frequently than weekly and by loosening the restrictions on material that can be published in the City Gazette, Propositions 1 and 2 are needed to clarify that common current practices are permissible.

Proposition 3 is needed as well, but it makes substantive changes in the way citizens can enact ordinances through the initiative process.

The strongest benefit the proposition offers is to give initiative backers a fixed time - 180 days - in which to gather signatures. At present the petition-circulation step is openended, meaning a petition can be years in the signature-gathering process. That much latitude is excessive.

Secondly, Proposition 3 would require that initiatives be submitted to City Hall to be checked for legal and technical problems. It would be up to initiative sponsors to decide whether to accept any recommendations, but the 10 days allowed for review would be well spent if they avoided complications that wouldn’t otherwise surface until after a flawed proposal had been enacted.

Where Proposition 3 has drawbacks is in providing for only an advisory vote on so-called “citizen petitions” - those that collect signatures equalling at least 5 percent but less than 15 percent of the turnout in the last general election.

At present 5 percent is enough to force a binding election. Merely raising the signature threshold to 15 percent, a level more in the mid-range for other Washington cities, is not particularly troublesome.

However, the proposition also gives the City Council a way to avoid even an advisory vote on citizen petitions by passing a modified version of the original. How much modification would be allowed before it significantly altered the initiative’s purpose? That’s a knot lawyers and courts would someday have to untangle.

Even so, once the untangling occurred, Spokane would still have a citizen-friendly initiative process by most municipalities’ standards, but one which finally included reasonable time limits for signature collection.

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