ELECTIONS : COUNTY INITIATIVES : Pushers Make Name for Themselves

Want to build a garbage dump? How about protect the area’s farmland from development? Stop a new wing of the county hospital? Or halt the expansion of a mall?

With a healthy pile of cash, you too could hire the team of professionals needed to place your pet issue on an upcoming ballot.

It’s the new political trend popping up around Ventura County as business interests and citizen activists join the ballot initiative craze that seizes California every election season.

Thwarted by public officials, they have decided to take their case directly to the voters. They hire lawyers to draft ballot measures and political consultants to design campaigns.

To collect enough signatures to make the ballot, they bring in professional petitioners to stalk voters in front of supermarkets, or pin them down in parking lots.

Armed with a pen and clipboard, this itinerant band of petition pushers can earn $1 or more for each signature they extract from the citizenry. And unlike hapless volunteers, they deliver.

Consider the petitions that have been on the streets lately:

* A San Diego developer spent $104,000 to qualify an initiative for next March’s ballot that asks Ventura County voters for permission to build a dump in Weldon Canyon north of Ventura--a proposal snubbed by county supervisors. Professionals received a $1 bounty for each signature collected.

* Slow-growth activists paid professionals $7,700 to help gather signatures for two farmland preservation measures on Ventura’s Nov. 7 ballot. The measures would forbid the City Council from allowing urban expansion into farmland for decades, except when a majority of voters grants special permission.

* Privately owned Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura is paying $1 for each signature gathered to help qualify a referendum in March that would block the proposed new outpatient wing of its nearest competitor, the Ventura County Medical Center. Professional petition firms say they should have no trouble meeting the Nov. 9 deadline.

* Political consultants in San Francisco have hired professional petitioners to push an initiative that would scuttle a tax-sharing plan at the crux of expanding the Buenaventura Mall. Ventura officials believe the owners of a competing mall may be behind the measure.

“It is a unique situation that one county gets so much activity,” said Kelly Kimball, president of Kimball Petition Management Inc. in Agoura Hills.

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Kimball said his family run firm, in operation since the 1960s, has received four requests in the past month to gather signatures in Ventura County. “That is surprising, in that we have never done a Ventura County measure before.”

The burst of activity has also attracted the roving crews from California’s other top signature-gathering firm, American Political Consultants of Sacramento, and from Bob Glaser, a consultant who specializes in circulating petitions in Southern California.

“For Ventura, it’s been a hot year,” said Glaser, who had two crews working on local ballot measures in the county last week.

In addition to the local measures, these paid solicitors are collecting signatures for statewide initiatives to curb campaign donations and to end racial preferences through affirmative action.

Some of these firms have tapped into the lucrative business of collecting signatures for Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Perot was paying $3.50 for each new registration to help qualify his party for the ballot.

All of this money-driven politics fuels criticism that the initiative process, which was set up to curb the influence of special interests, has instead become a tool for those interests.

“It does seem to be a perversion of the original intent,” said Herbert Gooch, director of the Masters in Public Administration program at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. “The whole idea was to return the power to the people.”

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The initiative process, along with the referendum and the recall, were written into the state Constitution in 1911 in a push by Progressive Gov. Hiram Johnson. It was the culmination of the Progressive Party’s campaign to break the grip of the railroads and other big business on Sacramento.

Initiatives give voters the right to propose and enact laws, bypassing either the state Legislature, a county board of supervisors or a city council.

But many statewide ballot measures are now authored by special interests--the insurance industry, tobacco companies or other big businesses--not by typical citizens. And they make it on the ballot through the work of well-paid signature gatherers, not by a groundswell of popular support.

Any type of governmental reform would be tricky, Gooch says. If voters tried to restrict initiatives, they would limit their own right to petition the government.

To be sure, not all state or local initiatives are sponsored by special business interests.

The League of Women Voters backs a campaign finance reform initiative now in circulation. Citizen activists pushed for farmland preservation measures in Ventura, an initiative to reinstate the Oxnard Planning Commission and a measure to require the city of Ojai to spend more money on recreation projects.

Yet many of the successful citizen-inspired measures turn to the pros when volunteers lose steam in begging for signatures.

“Anybody who says it’s too easy to qualify a ballot measure ought to try standing in front of a store for a while trying to gather signatures,” said Glaser, a San Diego-based attorney and political consultant with about 400 solicitors on the streets.

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Former Ventura Mayor Richard Francis hired a petition firm to gather the final signatures needed to qualify the two Save Our Agricultural Resources initiatives on the Nov. 7 citywide ballot.

“The first initiative was about an 80% volunteer effort and the second one about 30% volunteers,” Francis said. “I hired professionals to get the job done.”

Citizen activists pushing to recall Ventura County school board Trustee Angela Miller decided last week to pay college students $1 a signature to collect enough names before the Nov. 3 deadline to qualify for next March’s ballot.

Oxnard activists relied on volunteers in their petition drive to reinstate the Planning Commission. But the effort fell 345 votes short of qualifying for the city ballot, after the city clerk tossed out about 20% of the signatures.

Bruce Bradley, the county’s election chief, said random-sample checks usually invalidate about 20% of signatures gathered because those signing are not properly registered to vote.

He advises petition sponsors to add a 20% cushion to the minimum signatures required in a particular jurisdiction.

The county elections office has been swamped of late with signatures to verify from petitions and new voter registration cards that pour in, Bradley said. About 75% of the 20,000 new registrations since mid-June have been submitted by professional solicitors working on various petition drives.

Many professional solicitors are independent contractors who float from place to place, though state law requires those circulating petitions for local ballot measures to be registered to vote in the specific jurisdiction.

County elections officials are rarely aware of these fast-moving solicitors--until they are long gone.

The elections office automatically sends a verification card to every new registered voter, confirming the name, address and party of registration.

Bradley said the manager of a Motel 6 in Ventura recently called to ask what he should do with 19 verification cards addressed to the motel. The migrant workers, who stayed there while gathering signatures for the Weldon Canyon initiative, had checked out. No forwarding address.

“I like the independence,” said Tony Beverage, who was collecting signatures in front of a Target discount store in Ventura last week. “When the money’s good, it’s really good. I made $50,000 last year. Well, $45,000 after expenses.”

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Beverage has been working throughout California, Washington and Oklahoma in recent years. On this stop, he was snagging shoppers for Community Memorial Hospital’s referendum to stop the planned expansion of the county’s hospital.

“Would you like to sign this to keep the county from wasting 51 million of taxpayer dollars?” he asked, reeling in a shopper. As soon as the shopper signed, he flipped over the clipboard to get a second signature on another petition. This one, he said, was “to end racial quotas.”

The initiative process has developed a thriving subculture of solicitors. They know each other, trade favorite places to collect signatures and swap war stories about hostile stores that harass them.

The Home Depot is among the most aggressive stores in trying to shoo petitioners from their doorsteps.

Cindy Perzel, a Ventura-based crew leader for several solicitation firms, said Home Depot in Oxnard tried to discourage her from registering voters in mid-October by having a forklift driver surround her table with three flats of pungent steer manure.

“It was extremely smelly,” Perzel said. “The hot dog [cart] man had to move to the other end of the store.”

Last Sunday, a manager at the Home Depot in Thousand Oaks made a citizen’s arrest of a petitioner and called sheriff’s deputies, Sgt. Rod Mendoza said. The woman continued to refuse to leave when deputies arrived and they took her to the the County Jail in Ventura and booked her, Mendoza said.

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She was cited for violating a misdemeanor loitering law in the Thousand Oaks municipal code, he said.

Michael Arno, president of American Petition Consultants in Sacramento, said this harassment continues despite clear legal rulings that such arrests violate the petitioner’s constitutional rights.

“There is a state Supreme Court decision that these public shopping centers are the public squares of today,” he said. “We know it and they know it. But they try to browbeat petitioners and hassle them.”

News of the arrest spread quickly among the petition firms. And some of them expect Home Depot to face a lawsuit over last week’s arrest. Home Depot managers did not return phone calls for comment.

For the most part, motivations behind local ballot measures are straightforward.

Richard Chase, general partner of San Diego-based Taconic Resources, is backing the initiative to build a 551-acre landfill in Weldon Canyon between Ventura and Ojai because the project cannot muster favorable votes from a majority of county supervisors.

Chase said he plans to spend between $500,000 and $750,000 on the campaign to woo voters’ support. “We think we have a very strong case,” he said.

Ventura Councilman Steve Bennett and former Mayor Francis are pushing the two farmland-protection measures to preserve open space in the city. Both are unabashed slow-growth activists, advocating steps to rein in the urban expansion onto surrounding agricultural land.

Community Memorial Hospital has been publicly critical of the county hospital’s plans to build a $51-million wing for outpatient services. The nearby hospital launched the referendum to overturn a Board of Supervisors’ vote in favor of the new wing. Community Memorial contends that the new medical facility will drive the county deeper into debt and be used to lure private patients from other hospitals.

But it remains unclear who is behind the Ventura ballot initiative intended to halt the expansion of the Buenaventura Mall.

What’s at issue is a deal struck between the city and the mall’s developers. As proposed, the developers would initially pay for $20 million in street improvements and be reimbursed by the city’s share of increased sales tax revenue once the expansion is complete.

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Ventura businessman Lary Reid said he is the head of a new grass-roots petition drive to stop the city’s tax-sharing proposal.

“I’m organizing it,” he said of the petition effort. “I don’t want the city to give away $20 million to invest in a private enterprise.”

Yet Reid said he has no idea who drafted the ballot initiative that he supports, nor who hired Kimball’s crews to circulate petitions on its behalf. Nor does he know who, if anyone, has paid the attorney or professional petitioners for their efforts.

Political consultants working on the campaign either declined to comment or could not be reached for comment.

“People are being very cute about who is really behind this initiative,” Ventura City Atty. Peter D. Bulens said. “This is all conjecture, but the only group of people who stand to gain anything by this is those people whose interest lie with another mall.”

Marketing studies show that shoppers in the area will not support regional malls in both Ventura and Oxnard. Robinsons-May and Sears have agreed to abandon The Esplanade shopping mall in Oxnard for the Buenaventura Mall once the renovations are completed.