| | | |  | | By Will McCarthy and Emily Schultheis | | Presented by |  | | | HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF — Last week, retired construction superintendent Dave McClure filed paperwork with the attorney general’s office to circulate an initiative called the Sustainable, Healthy Earth Act. The longtime Marin County resident says it’s been his dream for decades to require public schools to teach kids about sustainability and the environment. McClure has limited experience running campaigns or political fundraising. He does not have a fleet of petition-carriers ready to gather the million signatures necessary to put an initiative on the ballot, or a fully formed strategy for passing it if it gets there. What McClure does have going for him is $2,000 to spare. In 1943, when the fee for filing an initiative with the attorney general’s office was first set at $200, that represented a cost-prohibitive sum for many Californians. (It’s worth about $3,700 now.) But over the next seven decades, inflation drove down the real cost of heading to the ballot and the number of proposed measures exploded. Only 47 initiatives were filed throughout the 1960s, but that number grew exponentially to 282 in the 1980s and then doubled to 647 in the 2000s. Many of the submissions reflected the low barrier to entry. One initiative filed in 2009 required public schools to offer students “the opportunity to listen or perform Christmas music during the holiday season.” Another in 2007 prohibited animals from being microchipped. A third in 1991 would have mandated that the death penalty be performed “near the location where the crime was committed in an area open to the public.” (None of the three reached the ballot.) In 2015, after an Orange County lawyer filed a so-called Sodomite Suppression Act proposing to execute gay and lesbian people, then-Assemblymember Evan Low introduced a bill that would have increased the fee to $8,000. (The anti-gay initiative was dismissed by a court for being facially unconstitutional.) After some debate, lawmakers landed on $2,000 instead, where the fee still stands. Today, California is one of only four states to require a filing fee at all, and trails only Montana, which charges $3,700 to file an initiative. “You can’t just do something for 200 bucks and turn the state upside down,” said Bob Hertzberg, the senate majority leader when the change took effect. “We went to $2,000 to get rid of the riff-raff.” While initiatives have slowed down from the breakneck pace of the 1990s and early 2000s, the filing deadline has not completely deterred political hobbyists from pursuing causes that have little hope of making it to the final ballot. Boyd Roberts, the proponent of a failed 2024 initiative to establish an online version of the University of California, said he never views these campaigns as a waste of money, although he understands why legislators do not want frivolous initiatives clogging up the system. After filing the last one in 2023, Roberts says, he got busy with life and work and never ended up conducting a serious signature-gathering campaign. He says he may one day try again. “$2,000 is $2,000,” said Roberts, an Orange County real-estate broker. “When I’m broke, it seems like a lot. When I’m not, it’s just $2,000.” NEWSBREAK: Federal judge accuses President Donald Trump of violating order to restore frozen funding… Judge also blocks Trump’s cuts to health research funding… Sam Altman rejects Elon Musk’s bid to purchase OpenAI. Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM focused on California’s lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
| | | | A message from Airbnb: Airbnb is here for Los Angeles. Learn how. | | | |  | TOP OF THE TICKET | | A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures — past and future, certain and possible — getting our attention this week. 1. Prison labor (2026?): The coalition that failed to pass Prop 6, a 2024 amendment to close a loophole excluding prisoners from the state’s slavery ban, is aiming to put a simplified version of the question back before voters. Assemblymember Lori Wilson has severed two core issues, with an amendment focused exclusively on the constitution’s slavery language and separate statutory legislation addressing involuntary servitude in prisons. Yes on Proposition 6 spokesperson Esteban Nuñez says a campaign committee is in formation. 2. Measure A (Long Beach, 2020): A local residents’ watchdog group calling itself the Long Beach Reform Coalition announced it was suing the city over a December council vote that moved up the implementation date of a voter-approved sales tax increase from October 2027 to April 2025. Measure A passed by just 16 votes in 2020, and local reports estimate that the city could generate $48 million in additional revenue by scheduling the increase to take force two years ahead of schedule. Opponents say the move is unconstitutional and violates the will of the voters. 3. Cannabis reform (2026?): Cannabis Aligned has asked at least 20 weed-adjacent businesses to cough up $7,500 each for initial polling and staffing needs for its campaign to repeal and replace Proposition 64, coalition leader Nina Parks told supporters in a recent Zoom presentation. 4. Measure A (San Mateo County, 2025): The effort to remove a “rogue” sheriff has united nearly the entire elected leadership of the San Francisco Bay peninsula county behind a constitutional amendment that would create a one-time exception to its recall rules. While dozens of mayors and city council members from most of San Mateo’s 20 cities are asking their constituents to vote for the measure, which appears on a March 4 special election ballot, embattled Sheriff Christina Corpus calls it a “politically motivated” attack. 5. California Forever (Solano County, 2026?): Suisun City is making overtures to opponents of the start-up city project currently hoping to use the town’s annexation plan as an off-ramp from another countywide initiative. City manager Bret Prebula has offered to meet with California ForNever, an online group that organized to fight a 2024 ballot measure, according to member Michelle Trippi. 6. Veterans property tax exemption (2026): Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo introduced a constitutional amendment last Thursday to expand property tax exemptions for veterans and remove prohibitions based on an individual’s wealth. Already the fifth constitutional amendment introduced in the Assembly this term, the bill can get a committee hearing in early March. 7. Proposition BB (San Francisco, 1993): Officer Bob Geary, the proponent of one of the most bizarre and delightful initiatives in California history, passed away last week. Reprimanded by his superiors for patrolling San Francisco’s North End with a ventriloquist puppet he called Officer Brendan O’Smarty, Geary took his grievance to the ballot. Prop BB was drafted to allow Geary to “exercise his professional judgment” in deploying the cop-attired puppet. The measure passed, and the two partners roamed the city for a decade thereafter. (Geary was slapped down by the IRS when he tried to claim the $9,711.49 he spent on the Committee to Save Puppet Officer Brendan O'Smarty as a work expense, a ruling eventually upheld by the Ninth Circuit on appeal.)
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A Yes on 20 ad from the 1972 California Coastal Commission ballot measure campaign. | California Coastal Commission | BEACH BLANKET BUREAUCRACY — The California Coastal Commission is one of the most powerful regulatory bodies in the state, a 12-member panel that controls land-use decisions for 26 million people who reside along the Pacific Coast. In recent weeks, the commission has found itself as a target of Trump’s invective, participant in a legal tangle with Musk and the subject of an order from Gov. Gavin Newsom suspending its powers to allow rebuilding efforts in Los Angeles. Democratic and Republican lawmakers are pushing bills that would constrain the commission’s power. Now a daunting fixture of California’s bureaucracy, the coastal commission began a half-century ago at the ballot as a short-term patch to stall runaway development on the beach. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, industrial developments popped up along the Pacific with an increasing sense of menace, from a planned nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay in 1958 to the explosion of an oil drilling platform off Santa Barbara in 1968. Developers openly talked about transforming other, pristine oceanside tracts into something akin to Miami Beach. To push back, one hundred outdoors-minded groups banded together as the Coastal Alliance but failed through repeated efforts to pass a law shielding waterfront land from private uses. The ballot did not necessarily appear more welcoming: in June 1972, California voters overwhelmingly rejected Prop 9, a wide-ranging environmental initiative that would have restricted pesticides and permanently banned oil drilling along the shoreline. The Sierra Club, which had remained neutral on Prop 9, worked to draft a narrower coastal initiative. It would prop up a temporary commission to draft a comprehensive plan for coastal lands and waters while placing a hold on building projects underway. Notably, the bureaucracy it created was designed to be temporary: the State Coastal Zone Conservation Commission would disappear in five years. The Coastal Alliance used volunteers to collect 400,000 signatures in a month to ensure the Coastal Zone Conservation Act would appear on the November 1972 ballot, the first presidential election in which 18-year olds could vote. Clem Whitaker Jr., whose legendary Whitaker & Baxter firm had defeated Prop 9, signed on to run the Citizens Against the Coastal Initiative opposition. He began pulling in then-sizable checks from business interests: $30,000 from Standard Oil, concerned about the initiative’s impact on its El Segundo refinery; and $25,000 from Pacific Gas & Electric, which argued the new law would just drive its power plants further inland. He put the $1.1 million budget toward 500 billboards across Southern California alone, declaring “The Beach Belongs to You — DON’T LOCK IT UP!” and ads showing a half-finished house among the dunes. “Conservation yes, confiscation no,” declared one slogan. The proponents, who raised only a fraction as much, were left to rely on support from op-ed pages and free-media stunts like a lawmaker-led bike ride down the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. Press coverage highlighted the imbalance in backing — 60 legislators, including both chambers’ Democratic leaders, for Prop 20 and only one against it — and some unlikely intrigue along the 550-mile route. In San Luis Obispo, Senate President Pro Tem James Mills accused some “portly gentlemen” trailing him. “It offends me,” he told reporters, “that these overfed men are claiming equal time for their heroic limousine ride whenever we are given a little time on television and radio.” Prop 20 passed by 10 points, building its margins in the coastal counties most affected by the new rules. But it ended up having a far more lasting impact than any voter in November 1972 would have likely expected: Four years later, the legislature decided to make the California Coastal Commission permanent.
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| | | | | ON OTHER BALLOTS | | Republican politicians in Nebraska, who have long hoped to do away with the state’s practice of awarding some of its electoral votes by congressional district, plan to put the issue before voters in 2026 … Nevada teachers unions have submitted enough signatures for a 2026 initiative that would allow their members to strike … Lawmakers in South Dakota are proposing a constitutional amendment that would raise the voter threshold for enacting future statewide constitutional amendments to 60 percent … A Republican state lawmaker in Arkansas introduced legislation to change the state’s ballot measure process, including giving state election officials greater authority to reject initiatives, referenda and constitutional amendments for confusing or misleading language … In Idaho, the Republican-led state legislature is considering a requirement that initiative backers gather signatures from all of the state’s 35 legislative districts … And voters in Switzerland soundly rejected an initiative to adapt the country’s economy to the planet’s ecological limits.
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| … REDONDO BEACH: For over 50 years, a little beachside paper called The Easy Reader has arrived each week in the yards and mailboxes of Redondo Beach residents. A faithful chronicle of town life, there are features on toy drives and high school sports, advertisements from local lawyers and earnest letters to the editor. Next month, Redondo Beach voters will decide on the fate of another fixture of the publication in this Los Angeles suburb of 67,000. Hidden among the advertisements and hyperlocal journalism, a morning surfer paging through The Easy Reader will also find, on page 22 or thereabouts, dense notices about city ordinances and public meetings. “It’s just odd, nowadays,” city clerk Eleanor Manzano said of the requirement that her office place these ads in The Easy Reader, at an annual taxpayer expense of about $15,000. “Sometimes people get the paper, there's a paper boy who goes around, but not always. It’s just a beach newsletter kind of thing.” Now Manzano is leading the charge among officials who want to remove the obligation as part of a package of changes proposed by a charter-reform committee. On March 4, Measure CAP will ask voters if Redondo Beach should alter its constitution to make public notices disappear from The Easy Reader. The practice of public notification, which dates back to early civilizations, was formalized in newspapers during the First Acts of Congress. Redondo Beach’s 1949 charter obligates the city to print any ordinance in its “official newspaper,” a designation held for a generation by The Easy Reader. In recent years, that has compelled the city to buy $10,000 in advertising just to list an extensive set of building-code changes. Even a short public meeting notice can run up to $800 dollars. To save money, the city prints in the minimum font size, making it all the less likely that anyone will take the time to read it. A ballot argument for Measure CAP argues the charter requirement was “crafted in an age where modern technology was a black-and-white television” and that the public notification process is “time-consuming, expensive, and accomplishes very little.” If the amendment passes, the city could post municipal notices on its website and in three public places, rather than in a physical newspaper. (Due to state law, affairs related to state government would still need to be published in a newspaper.) City officials have told The Easy Reader if the amendment passes they would continue publishing summarized ordinances, but The Easy Reader’s longtime publisher Kevin Cody estimates the newspaper would likely lose 75 percent of its city revenue if Measure CAP takes effect. “When people peruse newspapers, they would learn stuff they didn't specifically seek out. No one searches for legal notices,” Cody conceded. “But it's hard to argue that they should print these full ordinances. I’m happy to take the money, but I can see what their argument is.”
| | | | A new era in Washington calls for sharper insights. Get faster policy scoops, more congressional coverage, and a re-imagined newsletter under the leadership of Jack Blanchard. Subscribe to our Playbook Newsletter today. | | | | | | | THAT TIME VOTERS ... | | … HIT THE RAILS: Californians have seen ballot measures on a wide variety of train-related questions, including to: Allow the Public Utilities Commission to set the number of brakemen (1948, passed) … Amend the state labor code to prohibit union “featherbedding” of firemen on crews after diesel locomotives made their jobs obsolete (1964, passed) … Issue $1 billion in bonds for mass transit statewide, and nearly $2 billion in bonds for 29 rail projects and Sacramento’s Railway Technology Museum both 1990, both passed) … Direct a portion of motor vehicle gas-tax revenue for purchase rail transit vehicles and equipment (1990, failed) … Require the state Department of Transportation to develop 10 standardized elevated dual-track monorail systems, five in urban areas and five in rural areas, and test their effectiveness (2001, did not qualify) … Issue $9 billion in bonds for the planning and construction of a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles (2008, passed) … And terminate the already-approved high-speed rail project and prevent the issuance of future bonds for high-speed rail (2014, did not qualify).
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