Schrag: California’s Initiative-industrial Complex: Prop 98 and Faux Populism

At last count, the League of Cities was in for more than $3 million in the campaign to block Proposition 98 and pass Proposition 99; Californians for Neighborhood Protection, a creature of the League of Conservation Voters funded by environmental and labor groups, was in for more than $1 million and the Nature Conservancy for $250,000.

Those are hefty amounts, but they make clear that Proposition 98 is about a lot more than government condemning some hapless homeowner's house and delivering it (as Proposition 98 backers claim) to some politically connected developer for a hotel or a shopping center.

In any case, $500,000 from Realtors for Proposition 98 and proportional amounts from various groups of apartment owners and the Farm Bureau sound like a much more dubious approximation to vox populi than Jarvis' 1978 collection of aging homeowners.

The Proposition 98 lists, moreover, seem like a remarkable collection of unbundled contributors, where single individuals or businesses have written 10 or a dozen small checks on the same day aggregating $10,000 or more. One real estate development firm wrote 14 checks totaling $64,000 on the same day. How's that for "increasing" the number of contributors and keeping a low profile?

In the early 1980s, when Jarvis stood tall, the membership of HJTA was more than 300,000. It's now around 200,000.

The battle over Propositions 98 and 99, its poison pill alternative, are (once again) telling examples of how effectively the initiative process, written into the state constitution almost a century ago by well-intentioned political reformers, has been turned into an instrument of the very entities that its backers sought to check.

Once again, it's only people with deep pockets who get to play at all. Once again Bill Butcher, who, in managing Jarvis' slick direct-mail campaign in 1978, helped create what became known as the initiative-industrial complex, is a six-figure consultant to the Proposition 98 campaign.

Coupal charges that the cities, counties and his other opponents have illegally laundered taxpayers' money to fund their campaign, charges they deny. Nor would they be in the lists at all were it not for the multimillion-dollar campaign to strike down the local rent control ordinances that were in considerable measure sparked by Proposition 13.

Local rent control may in fact be lousy policy, distorting housing markets and discouraging both maintenance of existing housing and investment in new rental housing. But Proposition 98 wants to write the broken promise of 1978 into the state constitution and, once again, throttle local government and thus the ability of local voters to manage their own affairs.

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.