“I am a really big fan of the fact that Utah citizens have this right,” said Senator Lincoln Fillmore of Senate District 17 in Salt Lake County.
Fillmore is the sponsor of SJR2 and SB73, two pieces of legislation affecting citizen-led ballot initiatives. SJR2 aims to amend Utah's constitution to require initiatives that increase taxes to receive a 60% or higher vote in order to pass.
“We already feel like the initiative process is hard enough, and there is plenty of transparency within the initiative process that we don’t need to make it any harder,” said Melanie Wheat.
Wheat is the Utah advocacy coordinator with Mormon Women for Ethical Government, a nonpartisan advocacy group currently suing the legislature after it altered a successful 2018 ballot initiative. SB73 modifies requirements for initiatives in two key ways.
“First, cover the cost of an initiative, identifying where the money comes from. The second is that it just holds initiative backers to the same publication standards that are already required for constitutional amendments that the Supreme Court put in place last year,” said Fillmore.
Wheat said the bill might make the initiative process significantly more expensive.
“It would make initiatives cost another $1.4 million because they would have to advertise in every newspaper in the county for two months prior to the election. To put that into perspective, two of the initiatives that passed in 2018 their average cost was about $2 million each, so that would add a significant financial obligation to an already hard process,” said Wheat.
