Included in the Governor’s State of the State Address this year was his annual reference and advocacy to Initiative & Referendum (I&R). The Governor strongly supports I&R. So does one of Eden Prairie’s House of Reprensentatives members, House Majority Leader Erik Paulsen (R-42B). Rep. Paulsen has introduced the I&R bill in the House during the past few sessions. I’m sure he’ll be introducing it again this year.
The Star Tribune has panned the I&R concept. They call the idea a “klinker”. For another view of I&R, check out the website of a group called Citizens In Charge. They advocate for I&R around the country.
The debate over I&R is not going away anytime soon. It’s all about the role of the citizen in representative democracy. I’ve lived through both an Initiative and a Referendum while I was the City Administrator in Northfield, MN. Northfield offers its citizens Initiative, Referendum, and Recall because it is a Home Rule City with a City Charter. Recall is a tool that citizens can use to remove elected officials form office before the completion of their terms. This is what happened to former California Grey Davis. It’s interesting to me that the nobody at the state level is advocating for Recall in Minnesota, but that’s another story.
When I arrived in Northfield in 1996 the City was in the last stages of launching a new Sidewalk Construction Plan. The objective of the plan was to build new concrete sidewalks in residential and commercial areas in the City not currently served by sidewalks. The plan was funded by a special assessment on every household and business of about $70/household per year for five years.
The plan was adopted by an ordinance of the City Council. This is an important tidbit because the ordinance is what is susceptible to challenge through referendum. A citizens group opposed to the sidewalk plan gathered a sufficient number of names on a petition to force the Council to have a referendum. Citizens then voted to repeal the ordinance which the Council had adopted to implement the sidewalk plan.
So what did citizens reject? We heard some citizens say that they did not like sidewalks at all. We heard some citizens say they loved sidewalks, but did not like the funding plan. We heard some citizens say that they loved sidewalks, liked the funding plan, but did not like concrete. It was a mixed bag. To date, the sidewalk issue has been left alone.
In 1999, Target Corporation came to town with a plan to build a big box Target store on the edge of town. This upset our local downtown businesses and some citizens in the community who were philosophically opposed to big box development. Other citizens in the community, however, loved the idea of a Target in town and touted the convenience and price advantages of big box retailing.
Target’s proposal required a number of regulatory changes by the City if it were to go forward. When it seemed as though the Council might not make the necessary ordinance changes to allow the Target store, a group of citizens drafted their own Commercial Planned Development Zone zoning ordinance; gathered the sufficient number of names on a petition; and forced the Council to offer their zoning ordinance to the citizens through an Initiative special election. Citizens approved the ordinance by a vote of 50.9% to 49.1%.
So what did citizens approve? Did they really approve a twenty page ordinance that they may or may not have read word for word? Or, did they approve the general concept that the Council should welcome a Target store to Northfield? I think it was the latter, but the former is what they actually voted to approve.
Interestingly, the ordinance approved by the citizens by Initiative contained provisions which were not acceptable to Target, so after the ordinance was approved by the citizens it was modified by the City Council in order to make it more acceptable to Target. That was a politically dicey move, and it was challenged all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Court upheld the Council’s modification of a citizen-approved Initiative ordinance, but admonished the Council for doing it.
In my limited experience with Initiative & Referendum, I would say they are useful tools for citizens to express themselves to their government, but what they communicate is rarely very clear to decision-makers. Maybe more importantly, I&R never settles the issue for good, like you think that it ought to. The Northfield citizens involved in the I&R battles that I observed still fight about what they were fighting about, and what the actual results meant.
But as I said in the beginning, the debate over I&R is not going away anytime soon.
