A bid to revamp the Legislature stalls
Republican’s effort to create 12,000 local lawmakers fails to make the state ballot.
SACRAMENTO — An effort to radically reshape California’s legislative branch of government by electing as many as 12,000 local representatives failed Tuesday to qualify for the November state ballot.
The proposal’s backer, Republican businessman and candidate for governor John Cox, spent six years trying to get his “Neighborhood Legislature” plan in front of voters. State elections officials announced that the latest campaign fell short by 25,501 valid voter signatures.
More than 18,000 signatures collected by petition circulators were rejected after local registrars reviewed each of the signatures collected over the course of the last several weeks.
Cox, of San Diego County, sought to substantially change the way members of the Legislature are elected, by handing over the selection of the men and women who serve in Sacramento to newly created neighborhood councils. The specifics of his measure would have required the election of 12,000 neighborhood representatives, from whose ranks the 120 serving at the state Capitol would be chosen. He insisted the sweeping change to legislative elections would make lawmakers more responsive to Californians by creating new representation at the local level.
The proposal would have also shrunk the Legislature’s budget by one third and would have imposed a new cap on the salaries of lawmakers chosen to serve in Sacramento.
Cox’s political team said Tuesday that some county signature reports seemed incorrect, and hinted that there could be legal action to have some of the rejected signatures reexamined.
“Whether or not this reform idea is kept off the ballot, the goal and message of my campaign for governor haven’t changed, we need to eliminate the corrupting influence of special interest money in Sacramento and reclaim California,” Cox said in an emailed statement.
He first proposed the idea for the state’s 2012 ballot, but failed to gather the needed signatures for that effort, or for statewide elections in 2014 and 2016. For the latest attempt, he spent more than $2.3 million of his own money on signature collection. Last year, he told The Times that the ballot measure would help “take our government back from the funders, the cronies and the corrupt.”
The expanded Legislature idea was just one of Cox’s proposals for shaking up the legislative branch of government. In 2015, he wrote a proposed ballot measure to require legislators to wear NASCAR inspired logos representing their top political donors while on the job at the state Capitol.