Friday, June 04, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Education petition submitted

Backers confident signatures will be verified to put measure on ballot

Richard Arnold, left, and Roseanne Sorboro, right, on Thursday turn in stacks of signatures for an education initiative to Barbara Andolina at the Clark County Election Department. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Backers of a statewide education funding referendum said Thursday that they have so much support, they filed 50 percent more petition signatures than they were required to, and they did it almost two weeks early.

"When we were out collecting signatures, it was like a natural connection," said political veteran Scott Craigie, co-chair of the Education First initiative team. "People were quicker to sign up for this than anything I've ever been a part of."

The initiative, which would require the state Legislature to fund education before passing any other part of the state budget, will go before the voters in November of this year and in 2006 if enough of the 90,000 signatures submitted Thursday are verified.

Elections officials said that verification process should be finished within the next three weeks.

Supporters of another initiative focusing on education funding, backed by the Nevada State Education Association, are expected to file signatures with elections officials next week. That initiative would require public schools to be funded at the national average.

Craigie, a former teacher who served as chief of staff to Democratic Gov. Bob Miller, said the Education First measure enjoys bipartisan support.

Its chief backer is Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons, who pushed the initiative in response to a controversial state Supreme Court decision following last year's contentious legislative session in which a record tax increase was passed.

The court ruled that the Legislature's constitutional duty to pass a public schools budget outweighs the requirement for a two-thirds vote of lawmakers to raise taxes.

The initiative's backers began collecting signatures in January. State law requires that petitioners collect at least enough signatures in 13 of the state's 17 counties equivalent to 10 percent of the voters in the most recent general election.

That comes to about 51,000 signatures. The deadline to submit them to county election officials is June. 15.

On Thursday, backers said they submitted about 90,000 signatures in 15 counties. They submitted 51,162 to the Clark County Election Department alone, almost 4,000 pages worth.

Elections officials will spend the next several days counting the signatures. If they verify that there are enough, they'll take a random sampling of the signatures and verify them. If enough of those are deemed valid, the initiative will be put on November's ballot.

If it passes in November, it will have to go before voters again in two years. If it passes then, it will become a permanent part of the state constitution.

Craigie, the co-chair, said he is confident it will receive voter support.

A Mason-Dixon poll taken in March indicated about 68 percent of the state's voters support the measure.

But there has been criticism that it is simply a political tool with a pretty name.

"To me, it's window dressing," said Paul Brown, Southern Nevada director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance, a liberal advocacy group. "They came up with something that sounds nice, but it doesn't really do anything."

He said legislators usually pass budget issues on which they agree first, then save the difficult issues such as education for later. If education must be passed first, he said, it might lead to long special sessions such as the one last year, solving no problems.

What's worse, he said, is that the people who vote for the initiative will think they have solved the problem and won't think they need to do any more.

There has been speculation that Gibbons will be a candidate for governor in 2006, when the initiative would be on the ballot for the second time.

It would not be the first time that Gibbons ran for governor at the same time an initiative strongly linked with him was on the ballot. When he ran for governor in 1996, the Gibbons Tax Restraint Initiative was on the ballot. That measure, which ultimately passed, is the reason there is a constitutional requirement for a two-thirds majority to increase taxes.

"I hope he's not just using this as a populist issue so he gets high numbers in the polls," Brown said. "It just seems very short-sighted."