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JONI JAMESA ballot question appears likely this year to decide how easy it should be for citizen initiatives to change Florida's Constitution.
TALLAHASSEE - Three years ago, no one paid much mind to the quixotic idea of a couple of lawmakers from rural North Florida who were sick of seeing the state's Constitution peppered with special-interest ballot measures like net bans or bullet trains.
Republican Rep. Joe Pickens and Democratic Sen. Rod Smith were freshmen legislators without much clout. And their issue - making it harder to amend the state Constitution - didn't lend itself to snappy sound bites.
But in 2002 Florida voters amended the Constitution to ban caged pregnant pigs and spend billions of dollars to reduce class sizes. And last year a grass roots effort formed to put an initiative on this November's ballot to rein in growth, unnerving business leaders statewide.
Now Smith and Pickens are at the center of a highly charged political debate over Florida's version of direct democracy.
Some of the state's most influential business leaders have joined Gov. Jeb Bush and other state politicians to support Smith and Pickens' work. Sen. Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, signed on last year after sharing a Tallahassee apartment with Pickens.
"We weren't prescient, we just thought it was the right thing to do," said Smith, the former state attorney from Alachua whose star has risen so quickly he's considered a likely Democratic candidate for governor in 2006. "We were talking about this long before someone said "pregnant pigs."'
The unusual political consensus - virtually the entire Republican power structure supports it and even some Democrats have joined in - assures that come August or November, voters will check off, one by one, which changes they favor.
Voters will likely be asked to require a 60 percent majority to pass a citizen initiative, instead of a simple majority, and to give the Florida Supreme Court more power to kill initiatives that don't seem to belong in the Constitution.
Still under debate: whether those tougher standards should apply to amendments proposed by the Legislature and the Constitutional Revision Commission, which convenes every 20 years.
Also in dispute is what the deadline should be for submitting petitions for the ballot.
The Legislature doesn't know when it will ask voters these questions. More legislative support is required to poll voters outside a general election, such as the one in November. While legislative leaders would prefer to poll voters in an Aug. 31 primary ballot, it is unknown whether they have enough support to do so.
Even some supporters of constitutional reform are worried an early election will disenfranchise many voters, especially independent voters who usually have no other reason to go to the polls during partisan primaries.
The House favors an amendment to require citizen initiatives to identify a funding source for measures that have a fiscal impact. The House also wants a state law requiring signature-gatherers to disclose whether they are paid.
A poll conducted earlier this month by the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald found 66 percent of voters endorsed a 60 percent approval threshold for constitutional amendments.
But opponents argue voters don't realize the trade-off they're being asked to make.
Indeed, the plans the trio of lawmakers are pushing fall short of what Pickens and Smith envisioned when they stumped together at political events in Bradford, Marion and Putnam counties.
They wanted to ask voters to give up some power to amend the Constitution in exchange for a new process to write state law by referendum. But that has fallen victim to political compromise.
"We had to face political reality. There was a lot of talk that that solution might be worse than the disease," said Pickens, a lawyer from Palatka. "I don't agree, but there's just no appetite in the Legislature for that right now."
Grass roots groups warn that the compromises could doom the proposed changes.
Representatives for Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Sierra Club told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that there is no chance they will support the effort without a new system allowing voters to amend state law.
"Our members don't really have a problem with changing the Constitution, providing the citizens have another avenue," the ACLU's Larry Spalding told the committee. "But quite frankly, this amendment process isn't really addressing the problem."
The problem, Spalding said, is voters feel ignored by legislators on big issues they want addressed, so they turn in frustration to the initiative process.
Critics also say the changes benefit special interests opposed to grass roots efforts because they will need just more than 40 percent of voters to kill a measure.
The debate has raised the ire of the liberal People for the American Way and the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a labor-backed pro-initiative group out of Washington, D.C., that is pushing a November ballot measure that would raise Florida's minimum wage. It has also drawn the attention of the voters-rights group Citizens in Charge, a pro-initiative Washington, D.C., group run by Paul Jacob, who helped launch the term-limits revolution nationwide.
"What they're asking is for voters to give up their right to keep them accountable," said Philip Blumel, who, along with fellow registered independent voter Rick Shepherd, led a successful eight-year term-limit initiative in 2002 in Palm Beach County. The two this week launched a new group, the Florida Initiative League, with Citizens in Charge's help to oppose the Legislature's plan.
"The question here is, "Who's the boss?' I thought we'd answered that question many times in this country," said Jacob, president of Citizens in Charge and founder of U.S. Term Limits, the Washington group that supported term limit initiatives across the country.
But Smith, Pickens and Atwater insist their proposals still make sense. They note they staved off far more dramatic changes pushed by Florida VoteSmart, a group organized by the Florida Chamber of Commerce to push for reining in constitutional amendments.
Those included shortening the four years petitioners have to gather signatures and applying any changes voters might approve in the Aug. 31 primary to initiatives on the Nov. 2 ballot.
Lawmakers also rejected asking voters to approve an even higher passage rate for all future constitutional amendments, from 66 percent to 75 percent.
"When I talk to voters, almost to a person they say, "We've got to do something, it's become too easy for the flavor of the month to get inserted into the Constitution,"' Atwater said.
"What we're doing is giving voters a menu of choices. We won't decide this, they will," he said.
- Joni James can be reached at jjames@sptimes.com or 850 224-7263.