This could be a busier than usual election year for labor if the mega sales tax and other issues, good and bad,  get enough signatures to get on the ballot. 

Petitioners begin hitting streets for signatures
By RUDI KELLER
Columbia Tribune
Sunday, October 30, 2011

Over the coming months, at street fairs and in shopping districts, Missourians will be approached by people with clipboards asking them for their signatures on initiative petitions.

ACTIVE INITIATIVES
Ideas embodied in those proposals include higher tobacco taxes, repealing personal property taxes and eliminating the state income tax. There are initiatives to limit campaign contributions, reduce the size of the Missouri House of Representatives and to allow early voting.

In all, 34 petitions have been certified for circulation by the Secretary of State, with more in the pipeline. It takes 92,000 to 100,000 signatures to put a statutory change on the ballot and 147,000 to 159,000 signatures to put a constitutional change before voters. The ranges are based on where in the state signatures are collected.

Two proposals would make it far more difficult for lawmakers to alter laws passed by initiative. Under the proposal, lawmakers would have to muster a three-fourths majority to do so. The petition drive on that issue was sparked by actions this year to rewrite voter-approved laws on dog breeding, renewable energy, the minimum wage and nuclear power plant construction.

Freshman Rep. Scott Sifton, D-St. Louis, a spokesman for “Your Vote Counts,” said he conceived the idea soon after taking office. “I was only in Jefferson City a few weeks, and I was beginning to wonder if we were going to do something other than overturn what voters decided.”

Under the proposal, the supermajority rule would apply forever and even technical changes to smooth implementation would be subject to the requirement. Non-controversial technical changes should have no trouble meeting the threshold, Sifton said. The aim, he said, is to prevent attempts to weaken or repeal laws proposed and approved by voters.

“When millions of Missourians weigh in on an issue they are entitled to substantial deference,” Sifton said. “This is a standard that requires bipartisanship and cooperation from legislators from all regions of the state.”

But the high standard and open-ended nature of the requirement has put off at least one group that has fought battles with lawmakers.

Missouri Jobs with Justice, which pushed the successful 2006 initiative to increase the state minimum wage, is awaiting certification of its proposal to increase it again, this time to $8.25 an hour. The group has fought attempts to take away the cost-of-living inflation adjustment included in the 2006 measure.

“They have attempted to change this every year and voters have spoken out, and they have not succeeded,” said Lara Granich, the group’s executive director.

But right after it passed, supporters and opponents agreed a change was needed — the overtime rules in the measure had an unintended impact on how hours are counted for firefighters. “That is a good example of the common-sense things that would be hard to do if that passed,” she said.

A similar result was achieved this year when Gov. Jay Nixon stepped into the fight over dog breeder rules. With those seeking an outright repeal on one side and those wanting no change on the other, Nixon negotiated a compromise acceptable to almost all the groups involved. The Humane Society of the United States, which had funded the initiative, was one of the groups not pleased with the deal, and it has put $146,000 in the Your Vote Counts campaign.

Granich said her group will stay out of the Your Vote Counts effort even as it gears up for another fight over the inflation adjustment. The Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations recently announced that, because of 4.2 percent inflation in the past year, the state minimum wage beginning Jan. 1 would be $7.25 an hour.

The federal minimum has been $7.25 an hour since July 2009, so the lowest-paid workers in the state will not receive a raise. But because the state and federal wages are now equal, business groups will be pushing lawmakers again to repeal the adjustment before rising prices push the minimum wage above the federal standard.

The latest adjustment “underlines the need to break Missouri’s minimum wage away from the automatic escalator to which it is currently tied,” Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Dan Mehan said in a news release. “It causes uncertainty and positions Missouri to eventually raise its minimum wage to uncompetitive levels.”

Mehan said the chamber would fight the new minimum wage initiative as well.

Reach Rudi Keller at 573-815-1709 or e-mail rkeller@columbiatribune.com.