Resolution could change petition protocol

A resolution on Tuesday's Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly agenda would ask the Alaska Legislature to give municipal governments the authority to require that sponsors of local initiative and referendum petitions collect signatures in all districts of the borough.

Resolution 2008-11, sponsored by Assemblyman Ron Long, of Seward, would approximate a 2004 state law that now requires sponsors of state initiatives and referenda to acquire signatures of qualified voters residing in at least three-fourths of the house districts in the state, and that within each district those signatures equal at least 7 percent of the people who voted in the preceding general election.

The state rewrote its petition rules after voters approved an amendment to the Alaska Constitution requiring the change. However, where municipalities are concerned, state law, not the constitution, governs petition drives. Thus, Resolution 2008-11 would ask the Legislature to amend Title 29, which deals with municipal government functions.

"Currently, the state statutes contain no authorization for municipalities to require signatures be obtained from a minimum number of voters from specified areas throughout the municipality," Long said in a memo to the assembly. "It is appropriate to impose this requirement in order that the initiative petition reflects the wishes of the entire municipality as opposed to more populated centralized areas alone."

Clauses within the resolution note that currently petitioners can concentrate efforts in highly populated, centralized regions of the borough. While that may make signature-gathering easier, those signatures may not be sufficient to demonstrate whether a petition's theme has support in outlying areas. Requiring some proportionality in signature numbers from districts could ensure a "full spectrum" of borough residents were behind putting petitions on municipal ballots.

While the measure is asking for state statute authority, it would leave it up to municipalities to actually impose any new signature requirements.

Long said the exact details of how such a rule might work in the Kenai Peninsula Borough, where state voting precincts and assembly districts sometimes overlap, have yet to be worked out. They would be written, he said Thursday, if and when the Legislature amended state law allowing municipalities to impose such regulations.

There are five areas of the borough that should be easy to understand, he said. State voting precincts established for state elections don't match up when it comes to assembly districts boundaries. There is overlap in Assembly Districts 1, 4 and 7, and also in 3, 8 and 9. Those triplets could become two of the five signature collection areas, along with three other Assembly districts (2, 5 and 6) where there is no overlap.

"My first thought was that petitioners should collect at least 7 percent of signatures from at least three (areas) and the rest could come from anywhere," Long suggested. "That's not asking a whole lot."

However, should the state approve the idea, and the borough decide to impose rules to ensure wider support for putting issues on the ballot, just how petitioners might be required to collect signatures could look entirely different, Long acknowledged.

In recent years, the grassroots group Alliance of Concerned Taxpayers has sponsored most citizen-driven measures making it to the ballot. Long insisted that his resolution was not directed at ACT. He waited, he said, for a time when both the Legislature was in session and ACT was not actively engaged in a petition drive to submit the measure to the assembly in an effort to remove any inference that it was meant to be anti-ACT.

Hal Spence can be reached at hspence@ptialaska.net.