When voters say yes or no to a ballot initiative, they’re acting as state lawmakers — exercising the same power as their elected legislators in Olympia.
Unlike their counterparts, however, voters have the luxury of taking a very limited view of the issue at hand. Their power to enact a new program that costs money, for example, isn’t constrained by the responsibility of figuring out how to pay for it.
The result, too often, is that voters paint the Legislature into a fiscal corner, leaving them little choice but to suspend programs the voters put in place.
A bipartisan group of legislators is proposing to change that. They’ve drafted an amendment to the state Constitution (Senate Joint Resolution 8218) requiring citizen initiatives to identify new sources of funding to cover new costs they create. Because a public vote is required to change the Constitution, voters would get the final say on such a rule.
We think it’s a reasonable step, given recent initiatives that seemed to lead voters to believe that some good ideas carry no significant costs.
This year, for example, voters overwhelmingly approved Initiative 1163, which requires additional state-funded training and background checks for home-care workers, but didn’t come with a funding source. The price tag isn’t enormous in the scheme of the overall state budget — about $31 million over the next six years — but comes as severe cuts are being made to programs in education, social services and corrections. Funding 1163 will require even deeper, painful cuts.
A larger, ongoing problem stems from passage of two public school initiatives in 2000 — I-728, which calls for smaller class sizes, and I-732, which mandates cost-of-living raises for K-12 employees. Together, they would cost more than $1 billion in the current two-year budget cycle, so the Legislature suspended them, as they have in previous years.
I-728 and I-732 were approved during good economic times, under the wide presumption that continued growth in revenues would cover their costs. That plan didn’t last long, leaving two good but unaffordable ideas on the books.
It’s not hard to sell a good idea in the abstract. Smaller class sizes and home-care-worker training sound good to most people. Attaching a new tax to an idea, though, tends to make voters weigh the issue more carefully. I-884, a measure to add $1 billion to education funding through a 1-cent increase in the state sales tax, was rejected by a 60-40 margin in 2004.
At least it was a responsible proposal, one that would have paid for itself. That should be a requirement of all laws that create new programs, whether passed by elected legislators, or by voters acting in the same role.
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