Activists sue to block state-splitting measure
Environmental group’s lawsuit says proposal to cleave California is too sweeping to be placed on the ballot.
SACRAMENTO — A prominent environmental group took legal action this week to block Proposition 9, the proposal to split California into three states, from the fall ballot.
The challenge, filed with the California Supreme Court, asserts that the proposal is too sweeping in its nature to have been placed on the ballot under the same provisions used to enact traditional laws.
“In seeking to remove this initiative from the ballot, we are asking the court to protect the integrity of both the initiative process and our state constitution,” Carlyle Hall, an attorney representing the group, said in a statement. “Proponents should not be able to evade the state constitution simply by qualifying a measure as one thing, when it is so clearly another.”
Proposition 9 seeks voter consent to begin the process of dividing California into three states — one in the north, one that begins in the Central Valley and curves to the south and west to the coast, and a third along the coast anchored by Los Angeles County.
If voters approve, the proposal would have to ultimately be approved by Congress. The U.S. Constitution also lists a role for the California Legislature to play in the process.
The filing hinges on the belief that the ballot measure would be a “revision” to the California Constitution — a power not granted to voters under the state’s 117-year-old system of direct democracy.
Richard Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law, wrote in a recent Times op-ed column that the California Supreme Court has long recognized a rule that voters cannot approve as a constitutional amendment any measure that “revises” rather than “amends” the state Constitution.
Monday’s legal filing was sponsored by the Planning and Conservation League, one of the state’s leading environmental action groups.
Proposition 9 was crafted by Tim Draper, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who unsuccessfully attempted to place a sixstate division of California on the ballot in 2014. A request for comment to the ballot measure’s campaign was not immediately returned.
john.myers@latimes.com Twitter: @johnmyers