Taking (away) the initiative The Legislature and Poland Spring could dry up the grassroots BY LANCE TAPLEY

On both the left and the right, grassroots activists who collect signatures for citizens’ initiatives are distressed. They face a new and crafty challenge from the corporate world to the very possibility of collecting enough signatures to put a bill on the ballot. The Poland Spring Bottling Company has let an ominous political genie out of a bottle.

The news is not that the Legislature is considering a batch of bills to make gathering signatures for initiative petitions more difficult, as it is. That happens nearly every legislative session. Some legislators resent a process that allows citizens to go around them. Others believe direct democracy is not a good way to make laws. Others have constituents who feel uncomfortable with petitioners near the ballot box, as they often are on Election Day.

And the news is not that LD 374, sponsored by Senator Kenneth Gagnon (D-Kennebec County), the bill that has progressed farthest toward becoming law, would require signature collectors to stand more than 25 feet from a polling-place entrance. That’s a typical restriction proposal.

If passed, such a restriction would put signature gatherers in many communities out in the November cold and, maybe, rain. Thus, few signatures could be obtained, say activists. Only well-financed campaigns that could pay collectors to go to shopping centers and parking lots, they say, would be able to get the massive number of signatures needed for an initiative — 50,000 at present.

The news? It’s in what lies behind LD 374.

The bill was inspired by Poland Spring’s novel and successful attempt to suppress signature collection at the presidential election. The company has been fighting an initiative-petition campaign for a state tax on water extraction. On November 2, it sent employees to a number of polling places to convince voters not to sign the water-tax petition. People approaching petition tables sometimes faced an argument between those who wanted them to sign and those who didn’t, and they often reacted by walking away.

Now, in order to take such arguing outside the polling place, Gagnon’s bill, written by the Secretary of State’s office (and containing other election-law changes), would move the signature collectors — and the dissuaders — some distance away from the ballot boxes.

But for 30 years the polls on Election Day have been the prime locations for petitioners. City and town clerks must certify that signers are registered voters, and this certification is made easy if signatures on a sheet have been collected at a single polling place where registered voters from the same community gather as at no other time. When activists finally caught up with LD 374 — it had already received a majority "ought to pass" vote in February before the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee, which Gagnon chairs — they created such a protest that the committee agreed to reconsider it.

But here’s the riddle presented to the grassroots folks by the Poland Spring genie: Even if Gagnon’s and related bills are killed and signature gatherers are allowed to continue to solicit voters inside polling places, hasn’t Poland Spring shown those opposed to an initiative campaign how to squelch signature gathering — by creating an atmosphere of unpleasant argument around the petition tables?

Petition activists worry that Poland Spring may have even more disagreeable things in store. Kim Jeffery, the CEO of Nestle Waters North America, Poland Spring’s immediate parent company, declared ominously at a Maine State Chamber of Commerce meeting last October that our initiative process should be changed. Swiss-headquartered Nestle is the biggest food company in the world, with annual sales of around $50 billion, so Jeffrey has the financial muscle to back up what activists take seriously to be a threat.

THE LEGISLATURE’S RESENTMENT

The fight to restrict initiative petitioning is a tradition at the State House.

"These people who live under the Capitol dome do not appreciate the citizens passing laws," says Jonathan Carter, the former Green Independent Party gubernatorial candidate who has worked on many initiative efforts. "They feel they’re taking their power away." He is referring both to the legislators and to the lobbyists with whom legislators sometimes cut backroom deals.

A similarly outspoken activist, but on the political right, Mary Adams, who is running a signature-collection campaign to impose a cap on state spending, comes to the same conclusion: "Sometimes the enemies of the initiative are the Republicans, and sometimes they’re the Democrats. It’s whoever is in power."

Who’s in power in Augusta often means lobbyists for corporate interests, and they regularly are enemies of initiatives. Adams, who began fighting off legislative efforts to restrict initiatives in 1979 — following her victory in 1977 with an initiated bill to overturn a statewide school tax imposed not long before by the Legislature — ridicules what she sees as the hypocrisy about initiatives of some lobbyists, in particular the Maine State Chamber. It supported initiative-restrictive bills in 2001, but last year it gathered signatures for a property-tax-reduction ballot measure: "They oppose the initiative, but then it isn’t any time before you see these jerks out with their own referendum."

"Whether or not we used the process won’t change our position on the need to raise the bar" on signature collection, responds Dana Connors, the Chamber’s president. He suggests his lobbying group may support some of this year’s crop of restrictions proposed on signature gathering.

Adams, Carter, and other activists who rarely see eye-to-eye on issues enjoy combining forces to protect the initiative. "It’s fun," Adams says. "It’s a truce. Both the left and the right come together." Basically, it is the left and the right against the establishment center.

Their most prominent target at the moment is Senator Gagnon’s bill. Gagnon says he believes a compromise will occur with it and signature-collection rules will be tightened "a little bit." He adds: "I didn’t want to have fist fights at the polling place. We just need some reasonable controls."

Perhaps the Legislature should ask the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, he muses, for a ruling on what is constitutionally permissible for restrictions at polling places. He denies opposing initiatives, although he believes "most people don’t like signatures being collected at polling places," and his concern is "to preserve the election site as the temple of democracy."

INFORMATION OR "BLOCKING"?

When Poland Spring workers went to polling places in central and Southern Maine on Election Day to, according to the company, give information on the water-tax issue — to block signature gathering, according to petitioners — it was a very effective intrusion into the temple of democracy, say the leaders of H2O for ME, the group sponsoring the initiative.

Carter, a consultant to the campaign who spent the day personally asking citizens to sign, believes the group lost 10,000 to 15,000 signatures statewide because voters did not want to get involved in an argument.

"There’s no place for controversy at the polls," he says. "These people were goons. They were rude, obnoxious, and interjected themselves into what I was saying. They wouldn’t let me finish a sentence."

James Wilfong of Stow, the former Democratic state legislator who began the water-tax initiative effort, is of the same mind: "Where there were no blockers, we got big numbers. In Fryeburg, where there were four blockers, we only got 160 signatures. In York, where there were none, we got 1000."

A well-organized campaign for a popular proposal can easily obtain at a general election all the signatures necessary for an initiative to be put on the statewide ballot — equal to 10 percent of the vote for governor in the last election. Wilfong says his group only got between 35,000 and 40,000 on Election Day.

But it’s the indirect, long-range effects of what happened last November 2 that most trouble grassroots types. If Gagnon’s bill becomes law, Mary Adams believes, "Only paid campaigns in the future would succeed," referring to payments to signature gatherers. In her group, she says, no one is paid to collect them.