Senate Bill 690: Trimming the Grassroots

Karen Hall’s knees still haven’t recovered from gathering signatures door-to-door for an amendment to Bryan’s city charter. “Democracy is a messy business,” she says, “but we like it.”

Hall recently came to the Capitol to lend her voice to a grassroots fight against Senate Bill 690, which would make messy local democratic efforts a lot more difficult. Filed by Sen. Jeff Wentworth, SB 690 would raise the required number of signatures for a charter amendment in Texas’ 346 home-rule cities from 5 percent of qualified voters to 10 percent.

Brian Rodgers of ChangeAustin.org, who spearheaded a 2008 charter-amendment campaign to prohibit city tax dollars from subsidizing large corporate developments, calls petition drives “our check and balance on our local government.” He knows from experience how tough it is to gather the 5 percent. To collect the 18,400 valid signatures needed, Austin petitioners had to collect 27,000 because not everyone who signs a petition turns out to be a qualified voter.

The Legislature lowered the requirement for charter amendments from 10 to 5 percent in 1973. The point was to make charter petitions feasible while keeping the threshold high enough to prevent people from calling frivolous elections. According to Wentworth, the 5 percent threshold “is far lower than any other threshold prescribed for petition-initiated elections in Texas.”

“That’s absolutely not true,” says Linda Curtis of Independent Texans, a nonpartisan group that encourages voter participation. She cites the 500 signatures it takes to get a Texan on the ballot to run for Congress and the 1 percent of Texas presidential voters an independent presidential candidate has to gather to be on the ballot. Even at around 60,000 signatures statewide, that pales in comparison to the approximately 100,000 signatures required for a charter amendment in Houston under SB 690. Wentworth’s bill would also remove the current 20,000-signature cap for big cities.

“I’ve been involved in amendment drives in Houston, and I think the [current] threshold is still pretty high,” says Sen. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican. “It’s very difficult to get that many signatures. I have a real issue with taking that opportunity out of the hands of grassroots.”

Wentworth argues that a 10-percent threshold would “establish a more realistic barometer of public support.” But Rodgers points out that last year’s Austin amendment, after meeting the 5-percent threshold, ultimately won 48 percent support in November.

Wentworth says he worries that “some of these petitions are financed by maybe just one very wealthy individual and they can get that 5 percent by paying people.” But SB 690 could exacerbate that problem. With more Texas towns restricting petitioners to public walkways, a higher threshold might make it more likely that only the most generously funded campaigns would reach 10 percent of the voters.