Oregon's TABOR Measure fight stands as the biggest in the nation

Oregon is biggest spending cap fight left
Oregon - Three states drop from their ballots proposed measures to limit budget growth
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
BETSY HAMMOND
Oregon will be one of three states with a proposed spending cap on this fall's ballot, after officials in Michigan, Nevada and Montana disqualified proposed spending cap measures.
Oregon is by far the biggest of the three -- the others being Maine and Nebraska -- positioning it to be the most-watched battleground on the issue.
The measures would limit increases in state spending to the gain in inflation plus population.
In Michigan, which has nearly three times the population of Oregon, the state Supreme Court killed the measure last week because too many signatures were duplicates or invalid. At the extreme, one man signed 19 times, opponents found.
In Nevada, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the spending cap measure this month because proponents circulated slightly different versions that would have had differing financial effects.
In Montana, a district court judge disqualified the spending cap measure last week after finding massive fraud by signature gatherers who lied about their addresses and misled voters into signing for three measures under the guise they needed three signatures on a single measure and lacked carbon paper.
Two other states where proponents had spent half a million dollars or more to get a spending cap on the ballot also saw authorities yank their measures earlier this summer.
In Oklahoma, a unanimous Supreme Court threw out that state's spending cap measure on Aug. 31 because signatures were gathered by out-of-state circulators. And in Missouri, where backers poured more than $2 million into a campaign for it and another measure, proponents conceded this month that the spending cap won't be on the ballot because they submitted signatures out of the order required by law.
That means a coordinated effort to get spending caps on the ballots of eight states now will have to focus on Oregon, Maine and Nebraska. A court case is pending in Nebraska, where opponents of the spending limit contend it violates the state law limiting ballot measures to a single subject.
All the proposed spending limit measures were championed by Americans for Limited Government, a libertarian political group headed by Howard Rich, a New York real estate investor.
Backers of Oregon's measure submitted 109,000 valid signatures, comfortably above the minimum. Nearly 90 percent of the money for their signature drive came from Americans for Limited Government.
A broad coalition of unions, businesses, retiree groups, education advocates and law enforcement workers has formed to fight the Oregon measure. The coalition says it would harm vital services, including schools, public health and roads, whose costs often rise faster than inflation.
But advocates at the Taxpayer Association of Oregon, whose leaders wrote the measure, say they are confident Oregonians will favor a measure that allows limited growth in government and is likely to divert huge sums of tax revenues into a rainy day fund.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Betsy Hammond: 503-294-7632; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com