Some on Sammamish City Council lukewarm toward initiatives
January 18, 2012
By Caleb Heeringa
Sammamish’s city attorney warned the City Council of the potential pitfalls of instituting an initiative and referendum process in the city at a Jan. 10 council study session.
The council vowed to look at the issue in September at the behest of Sammamish resident Sam Rodabough, who says the city’s lack of initiative and referendum powers makes it “the donut hole of direct democracy on the Eastside.”
An initiative is a petition-driven measure by which citizens can have a proposed new law placed on the ballot for the citizens to decide. A referendum, also petition-driven, can be used to overturn the actions of the City Council.
Such powers are already widely used at the state level, but are not automatically granted at the city level. The council must either vote to institute them or a citizen must get signatures from registered voters equal to half the total votes cast in the most recent municipal election – a little more than 7,000 signatures based on last November’s voter turnout.
Rodabough said during public comment that he was generally pleased with the way the city has been run thus far and didn’t have anything specific in mind in wanting the powers of direct democracy at the city level. But he said having the option was a good insurance policy in the case of a bad decision by a future council.
“I view the initiative process as similar to having a pile of sandbags at home knowing one day there may come a flood,” said Rodabough, a land use attorney in Bellevue. “When the floodwater is rising it would be too late if we didn’t have the sandbags in place.”
City Attorney Bruce Disend argued that allowing initiative and referendum powers has tradeoffs. It allows citizens to address issues that the council is “either unwilling or unable to take on,” but is also “contrary to the concept of representative democracy,” in which elected officials are appointed to make decisions and are then held accountable for those decisions at the ballot box.
Disend also argued that initiatives and referenda have a tendency to be directed at narrowly tailored issues without consideration for the unintended consequences.
“Elected officials typically have more experience with and a greater understanding of the issues facing government – they get to see the forest and the trees while initiatives and referendums tend to focus just on the trees,” Disend said.
Disend went on to recount his own horror story of the local initiative process gone wrong. Disend worked for the city of Bellingham in 1988 when citizens passed an anti-pornography initiative that sought to declare pornography as a violation of women’s’ civil rights. The initiative was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the city was forced to defend the initiative in court, where a judge promptly ruled it a violation of the freedom of speech, leaving the city with a $40,000 bill for attorney’s fees.
Disend also credited the city for having “an exemplary public process” that values citizen input before the council makes major decisions.
“Rarely have I heard a citizen complain that there wasn’t sufficient public process before a decision was made in the city of Sammamish,” he said.
Rodabough said several councilmembers had indicated to him that they supported the idea of granting direct democracy powers locally but that they “were concerned about Tim Eyman arriving in the city of Sammamish.” Rodabough said those concerns were likely overblown, given that local initiatives are relatively limited in what they can address compared to statewide initiatives. State law dictates that local initiatives and referendums can’t:
u Address city employee pay or collective bargaining issues.
u Repeal the levying of taxes.
u Repeal the formation of a local improvement district
u Repeal unanimously passed ordinances that are “necessary for the immediate preservation of public peace, health, safety or for the support of city government.”
Eyman’s recent initiative to repeal a red-light camera program in the city of Redmond was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the cameras were not a proper subject for the initiative, though Eyman may have won the war if not the battle – the city ended up ditching the red-light camera program late last year, saying they were ineffective in preventing accidents.
The council, which has yet to schedule a formal vote on the matter, asked Disend for more details on exactly what would or would not be subject to an initiative or referendum.
Mayor Tom Odell, for one, was lukewarm on the idea.
“The ultimate referendum is an election … If people are unhappy with the performance of the council, they can express that at that time by removing the people they don’t like,” Odell said. “I think we need to proceed with due caution and not rush to judgment on this thing. We’ve managed to do without (initiatives and referendums) since the inception of the city and not had a problem. While it might be nice to have on the shelf, my experience in life is that there are a lot of things that it is nice to have but that you don’t really need.”
Outside expertise
During discussion on the pros and cons of local initiatives and referendums, City Attorney Bruce Disend highlighted the following excerpt from a 2002 paper by the League of Women Voters titled “Direct Democracy: The Initiative and Referendum Process in Washington State”:
“(Brigham Young University political scientist) David Magleby sees direct democracy (the initiative process) as valuing participation, open access and political equality, while tending to de-emphasize compromise, continuity and consensus. It encourages conflict and competition and attempts to expand the base of participants. On the other hand, indirect democracy (the legislative process), he says, values stability, consensus and compromise, and seeks to insulate fundamental principles from momentary passions and fluctuations of opinion.”
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