Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007 | 7:19 a.m.
Here's a lively scenario.
The teachers want gaming tax money. Sheldon Adelson wants room tax money. Sharron Angle wants no one to pay any additional property tax money. And Bruce Woodbury wants everyone to pitch in money.
Now you, the voter, decide.
If Nevadans were confused by competing versions of smoking bans on the ballot last year, just wait for 2008, political observers say. Already, at least a half-dozen interest groups and elected officials are talking about putting ballot measures in front of voters next year. Nevada, it seems, is falling for ballot initiatives much as California and other Western states have in recent decades. As Tom Skancke, a consultant who works on transportation issues, said, "Nevada is becoming an initiative state, just like California."
The result in California, Oregon, Washington and elsewhere is ballot measures that can be bewildering for voters but encouraging for special interests. Those interests have learned to appeal directly to the electorate - often through misleading advertising campaigns - to pass laws they could not persuade elected officials to approve.
One reason Nevada is coming to the party is that national interests are looking to the state to establish precedents. A state with just two large media markets - one north, one south - Nevada is seen as an inexpensive place to push agendas (legalize marijuana, ban smoking in bars, cut off government growth).
As other states have found, the success of one initiative breeds others as special interests become familiar with and confident in the process. In Nevada, local interests are using the initiative process to take stands that the state Legislature and governor won't (raise funding for transportation, make education a budget priority).
So Nevada voters can look to a future that promises "a lot of confusion," predicted Terry Murphy, a veteran political consultant.
"There will be a lot of frustration at the ballot box, and you'll probably see conflicting laws passed," Murphy said. "We'll be required to pay teachers more, but won't have the money to do it, for example."
Initiatives were added to the state's Constitution in 1912 as part of a Western wave of push-back from good government groups unhappy with big business dominating the political processes. It worked for a while. But then those industries figured out how to use them to their advantage. Nowhere more so than in California.
In that state, backers of ballot measures must gather signatures from registered voters equal to 5 percent of the number who voted in the last statewide general election. (In Nevada, the requirement is 10 percent.)
For a constitutional amendment in California, the threshold is 8 percent - or nearly 700,000 signatures. That's a daunting number.
But, for those seeking to put measures on the ballot, it's no longer a problem. The initiative process has grown from a cottage industry to a high-tech juggernaut. Political and business forces have become so adept at working it that the Golden State's ballot regularly resembles a phone book.
"In the name of democracy, the process undermines democracy," said Peter Schrag, a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and author of the book "Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future." The book lays out how California, a model of governance in the 1960s, suffered a decline in public services, partly because of the unintended consequences of initiatives.
An initiative with 200 pages of fine print is boiled down to a title and summary on the ballot, and to television ads, "which are not exactly overly informative," Schrag said.
Nevada is paying attention to California's lesson, or at least trying.
This past legislative session, the AFL-CIO pushed reforms that would give teeth to laws against forging signatures and require that signature collectors be paid hourly instead of per signature, and that signatures be collected in all 17 Nevada counties. The purpose was to try to prevent a repeat of the 2006 Tax and Spending Control Initiative, which sought to cap state spending. The Nevada Supreme Court threw it out, citing flaws in the gathering of signatures.
"We set the bar just a little bit higher, so you discouraged the kind of fraud we saw in the initiative," said Danny Thompson, head of the Nevada AFL-CIO.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, though, says the law requiring signatures to be collected in every county violates the U.S. Constitution, and it plans to file a lawsuit against it, said Gary Peck, the group's executive director.
Whatever the outcome of any challenge to regulations, Thompson and others acknowledged that there is political danger in trying to reform or even kill the initiative process. It is popular in many Western states because the public sees it as a check on government, even if the process is often manipulated in a way that resembles the very thing reformers sought to change a century ago.
"If you are limiting it too much, you look like you don't want the voters to have a voice," said state Sen. Dina Titus, who said she would support more reforms to prevent fraud.
Titus and others are particularly concerned about the setting of broad tax policy through initiatives, as Californians did three decades ago with Proposition 13, which limited property taxes and installed a deeply flawed system of taxation.
Carole Vilardo, head of the Nevada Taxpayers Association, put it this way: "I think I'm going to retire. I'm getting so tired of dealing with these damn initiative petitions."
She can stay in her job a little longer. State Sen. Bob Beers said he is not planning to put his TASC initiative in front of voters again, largely because money for the cause has dried up.
The number of initiatives that will make it to the ballot next year has yet to be determined. Although some initiatives are being considered, only one group has filed petition language for approval by the secretary of state. Angle, head of a group called We the People, withdrew a petition last week that would have limited property tax es , although she said she could refile.
Observers say measures with the best chance to move forward are populist messages with wealthy backing. Estimates are it will cost $500,000 to $800,000 to collect the 58,628 signatures needed to qualify for ballot.
One target is transportation. Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Legislature came up with about $1 billion last session, although analysis put the need at $5 billion.
Woodbury, a Clark County commissioner, said he will consider an initiative to raise money for transportation. "I am going to be looking at what can be done at the ballot," he said.
The State Education Association wants more money set aside for education, including paying teachers more. Asking voters to raise the tax on gaming is one possibility, said the association's president, Lynn Warne.
Adelson and Las Vegas Sands executives declined to speak about any effort to get an initiative on the ballot. But sources confirmed that efforts are under way to ask voters to take room tax money from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to pay for transportation projects.
Robert Uithoven, a Sands lobbyist and political consultant, said any talk about going to voters on the room tax was just speculation. But he said there are always groups that want to raise taxes.
"They don't feel like they have a chance with the political state of the Legislature and Gov. Gibbons' 'no new tax' pledge," Uithoven said.
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