Among the provisions of the People Power Initiative (the ballot question I’m petitioning to repeal Republican restrictions on our initiative and referendum rights) is Section 7, which would lift the 50-word limit imposed on the fiscal notes the Legislative Research Council writes for initiated laws and amendments.
The LRC produced fourteen fiscal notes for bills and resolutions in the 2019 Legislative Session. The average length of those fiscal notes was 369 words. Those notes ranged from 135 words to 978 words.
The LRC could not fully explain the fiscal impact of any of the bills sent its way this year in 50 words or less. To limit their explanations of initiatives to 50 words demonstrates that the legislators who imposed this limit aren’t interest in informing the voters; they just want an incomplete statement that will make voters think, “Uh oh! It costs money! Better vote No!” rather than offering a complete, detailed, and relatively independent LRC assessment of the fiscal cons and pros of an initiative.
The average length of fiscal notes shows why the People Power Initiative’s repeal of the 50-word limit is a good idea. Let the LRC fully inform the public.
Probably your weakest Section, Cory. LRC is not competent to judge fiscal impact in many cases, so expanding the explanation is just expanding the amount of b.s. they can spew. I’d still carry the petition, though, because the rest of the measure is pretty good.
I grant LRC can calculate simple revenue in-and-out projected over a year, but anything complicated and beyond a year they are lost. Unfortunately, people think they know more than they do and take their projections as gospel, rather than the fingers in the wind that they are.
What is the fiscal impact of, for example, letting people have a vote on solid waste facilities larger than a certain size? Would LRC see the cost of the election has the only relevant expense, or would it wade into the economic models used by EPA to show that solid waste facilities between 100,000 and 300,000 tons/yr were cheaper and less risky to operate? LRC’s economists has no expertise in landfill operation, so they would miss the most relevant issue of cost savings and risk reduction to South Dakota residents of closing small landfills, preventing large landfills and opening medium sized landfills. That, by the way, is what SD decided on, but the expertise didn’t lie with LRC, but with a combination of DENR, me and LRC’s Tom Magadanz (not an economist) who developed the concept of tiered regulation based on volume.
Most of the legislators have a working vocabulary of about 50 words. That’s where the word-count came from.
Donald, I agree that this provision by itself isn’t crucial to restoring citizens’ rights. I will also acknowledge that LRC is far from perfect. But I like having LRC’s analysis as a benchmark against which to measure the BS coming from the Koch Brothers and spinmeisters clouding the discussion of ballot questions. LRC does gather some useful information on bills and initiatives, and if we’re going to authorize them to gather and publish such information, we should not limit the detail they can give us about the information they’ve gathered and the conclusions they’ve drawn. When initiative fiscal notes are limited to 50 words, we don’t get the information about methodology, assumptions, and data sources that help us evaluate the fiscal note. No matter how small the working vocabulary of some legislators (largely those from the majority party) may be, I wouldn’t want to limit LRC to 50 words in explaining the fiscal impact of bills to our smarter, more attentive legislators. Removing the arbitrary word limit from initiatives simply gives us the same info we can get from some bills.
Actually, since fiscal notes are required for every initiative where the LRC can identify a fiscal impact, perhaps we should impose the same requirement on every bill: instead of waiting for some cranky legislator to request a fiscal note, let the lRC make that determination and issue the fiscal note on its own.
Mr. H, grudznick thinks you have another wonderful idea. Why wait for the legislatures to ask, just do!
CIRD, thanks for the laugh!😄😄😄
Cory, In the Legislature, requesting a fiscal note on a bill is considered a delaying tactic. Very few of those requests are actually meant to find out what the LRC estimates the bill will cost taxpayers, because if you hang around Pierre long enough you understand fiscal notes are largely b.s. I understand your point, though, that an LRC fiscal note will counteract some of the hyperbole, but fiscal note or no fiscal note, the hyperbole will flow.
Ah, once again, there’s my problem: I expect that words mean something, that the Legislative Research Council is meant to do research and that legislators requesting a fiscal note would actually be interested in obtaining useful information to guide their vote. Silly me. :-D