At first, Jim Miller wasn't thrilled with the idea of giving citizens access to the ballot in the county's home-rule charter.

But the arguments for "initiative and referendum" changed his mind.

Based on citizen input, Miller, a member of the Lancaster County Government Study Commission, and seven others on the 11-person GSC voted in May to amend the draft charter to not only allow people to force the board of county commissioners to consider an issue — but to take that issue to the electorate.

"What I failed to see in the beginning was that the power to require consideration without the power for enactment would prove to be a paper tiger and diminish the real intent of initiative, namely government responsiveness to citizen desires," Miller said.

Article VI, on initiative and referendum, includes one of the biggest philosophical changes to county government in the home-rule charter. Under the County Code, the state law that now controls the structure of county government, referendum is only allowed under limited conditions.

If voters approve the charter Nov. 4, activists could bring a proposal to the commissioners by getting 1,000 registered voters' signatures on a petition. If the petition is signed by a higher number of voters, the issue goes to the next general election ballot if the commissioners reject it.

And the GSC is poised to reconsider Article VI at its Tuesday, July 8, meeting. It's possible, said GSC member Heidi Wheaton, that the provision could be rewritten to lower the signature threshold.

That's what Bob Stanley of Elizabethtown has been arguing all along.

"The [GSC] commissioners need to provide citizen initiative and referendum without restrictions, other than those restrictions stipulated by state law," he said.

Home-rule critics and opponents, though, say Article VI could mean chaos in county government.

"Initiative and referendum is a solution in search of a problem," said minority GSC member Greg Sahd.

"With the current proposed charter, it doesn't matter what views we hold in regards to certain issues," said county Commissioner Scott Martin. "Three to five thousand people, out of 500,000-plus, can get their cause on the ballot. Is that truly representative government?"

Stanley disagrees.

"We still need our elected representatives," he said, "but we also desperately need a satisfactory, easily accessible form of initiative to enable citizens to take an active part in the leadership and future of our county."

More power
In its original form, Article VI only allowed citizens to bring an issue to the county commissioners for action.

Following a May hearing at Garden Spot Village, however, the GSC agreed with Stanley and other advocates of initiative and referendum to expand the power granted to citizens.

If 1,000 registered voters sign a petition, the commissioners would be required to vote on a citizen initiative. If the commissioners vote no, the initiative could be sent to the electorate — if the initiative petition is signed by a number of registered voters equal to 10 percent of the votes given to the top countywide candidate in the previous municipal general election.

In the last such general election, November 2007, district attorney candidate Craig Stedman was the top vote-getter, with 52,654. So an initiative petition would need to be signed by 5,265 voters to qualify for the ballot.

The number of signatures for ballot access would change, depending on the outcome of every odd-numbered year's general election results.

Some GSC members said the signature rules are an attempt to strike a balance between giving more rights to citizens and blocking frivolous initiatives from clogging up the commissioners' agenda and the ballot.

"[T]he real protection is the threshold of signatures required for full initiative," Miller said. "The challenge is to make that number high enough to prevent trivial proposals and at the same time not so high that citizen involvement is completely stifled."

Full initiative means enough signatures to qualify an issue for the election ballot. "Limited" initiative is the lower threshold of 1,000 signatures to bring an issue to the commissioners.

Miller agreed that initiative and referendum could hamstring any government, but he said Article VI was designed "with the intent to minimize that from happening."

He also noted that Article VI checks initiatives by requiring each petition to deal with a single subject — the goal, Miller said, is to ensure that advocates don't build a coalition of support by providing "something in it for everyone" — and prohibiting initiatives that deal with the current year's budget or capital spending.

Ballot questions would be limited to the general election so that all voters have a say in the outcome; in primaries, no-party and smaller-party voters tend not to turn out because they otherwise have nothing to vote for.

The article also gives the county commissioners the ability to place issues on the ballot themselves for citizen approval.

Indeed, Miller said, "the real fear of abuse of this section does not involve the citizen's excessive use of full initiative, but the [commissioners'] excessive use of referendum voting to effectively abdicate legislative responsibility in favor of citizen decision-making.

"When one researches the California model and looks at the breakdown of referendum votes, the number of referendum questions placed on the ballot by the legislature was far in excess of the number of questions placed by the citizens."

Nationally, initiative and referendum are most common at the state level rather than at the local level. Illinois Wesleyan University Professor Tari Renner writes on the Initiative and Referendum Institute Web site (www.iandrinstitute.org), though, that evidence indicates more counties and municipalities are using those forms.

In a survey by the International City/County Management Association, according to Renner, 58 percent of American communities polled reported allowing some form of initiative in 1996, up from 49 percent in 1991.

How often initiatives are employed is another piece of the I&R puzzle. In California, according to statistics on the Initiative and Referendum Institute site, there were 29 initiatives in 2001-02 at the city and county level, but only 11 were approved by voters.

Of the six Pennsylvania home-rule counties, five allow citizen-led initiative. Erie County requires 20 percent of the number of registered voters in the last election to sign a petition; Lehigh requires 15 percent; and Northampton 10 percent of the same baseline figure. Lackawanna requires 10 percent of the number of votes gained by the winner of the last governor election.

Allegheny County has a provision closest to Article VI: 500 signatures for "agenda initiative," equivalent to Lancaster County's limited initiative, and 5 percent of the governor's vote total to get an issue onto the ballot.

Too much, not enough?
Criticism of Article VI comes from two ends of the spectrum: those who think the article goes too far toward direct democracy, and those who think it doesn't go far enough.

Stanley, the Elizabethtown resident, and Wheaton are in the latter camp.

Wheaton sees the signature requirements as prohibitively high.

"For a candidate to appear on the ballot for either a county office, state House or state Senate seat, he [or] she must have less than 1,000 valid signatures on a petition," she said. "Why should we require citizens to have such a high hurdle for important county issues?"

When the GSC meets at 2 p.m., Tuesday, July 8, at the county courthouse, members will consider a number of revisions to the charter, including setting a lower signature bar in Article VI.

Wheaton noted that the County Code allows citizen-initiated referendum in third-class counties with 5 percent of the highest vote-getter's total.

"I believe there is a strong argument for a consistency with this existing  provision in the state statute," she said.

Stanley argues for making the requirements simpler: He would set the figure at 250 signatures for a limited initiative petition to the county commissioners and 2,500 signatures to get an initiative on the ballot.

He wrote in a letter to the GSC that its "main focus seems to be in limiting citizen action."

"To me, this shows the commission's fear and opposition in permitting 'real' citizen involvement in government operations."

Critics of home rule express concern about the effect of initiative on the workings of county government.

Sahd, one of the three GSC members to vote against the draft charter, contended initiative and referendum will "make it more expensive for the county, and taxpayers, to raise capital … because it injects a major element of doubt in the financial markets and in the investment banking community as to whether the home-rule county can issue debt, at the least net interest cost to taxpayers, with the strings of initiative and referendum attached to it."

Article VI says an initiative raising the county's debt limit may be placed on the ballot if the commissioners propose to borrow more than 80 percent of the county's state-mandated debt limit.

"To compensate all parties in the financial markets for this uncertainty, home-rule debt will need a higher interest rate to attract both institutional and individual investors," Sahd, a former county treasurer, said.

County Commissioner Craig Lehman, a Democrat, said while he supports the concept of full referendum, he thinks initiative provisions will increase the commissioners' legislative workload.

Commissioner Martin, a Republican, warned that any initiatives dealing with state and federal rules in the social service departments that the county administers "can conflict with what we're mandated to do by the state."

There are other concerns, he said.

"Could 5,000 people get their issue on the ballot for next year that utilizes X amount of county dollars to fund Planned Parenthood? …  How is this clearly defined? Where are the safeguards?

"There are no further guidelines as it pertains to what does or does not qualify for initiative or referendum. That leads me to assume that anything goes, and that can't be a good thing for Lancaster County."

But, supporters say, giving more power to the people is indeed a good thing.

Miller, a registered Republican, said  Republican Party committee members now "effectively decide the voting outcomes for the county in the majority of our voting decisions. The effect is that for many citizens, they are becoming more — and feel —disenfranchised from their government and from their ability to affect their government outcomes. "

"I am also not convinced that this is a 'either or' decision between representative government and citizen initiative," Stanley wrote in a July 2 letter to the GSC. "We can have both. We should have both!"

Next week: Article VII, accountability, conduct and ethics.

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Helen Colwell Adams is a Sunday News staff writer. E-mail her at hcolwell@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-4962.