“[W]e find the Amendment’s deficiencies so pervasive that we must nullify the Amendment in its entirety,” the 4-1 majority ruled, holding that the ballot measure violated the First Amendment. Justice Nancy Rice wrote the opinion, with Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey and Justices Michael Bender and Gregory Hobbs concurring.

Tom Lucero

The 2008 amendment was backed by Jon Caldara’s conservative Independence Institute. The amendment spokesman was conservative Colorado University Regent Tom Lucero, now a Fourth District Congressional candidate. It passed with a slim 51 percent of votes.

Sold to voters as a way to guard against pay-to-play style corruption, where groups doing business with the state support candidates who promise to deliver big money contracts once in office, the amendment also forbid teachers who were members of unions and their family members from donating to campaigns. The wording of the amendment was so clumsily written that many detractors were convinced from the beginning that it was overbroad by design.

“The authors of Amendment 54 tried to silence political speakers they don’t like, but they ran into a little roadblock called the First Amendment and, fortunately for all of us, they have failed,” said Mark Grueskin in a release. Grueskin, an attorney at Isaacson Rosenbaum P.C., represented some of the plaintiffs in the case.

Today’s decision was a strong endorsement of the injunction against the amendment handed down in June by Denver District Court Judge Catherine Lemon. Even the one dissenting opinion expressed on the Court today, that of Justice Alex Martinez, underlined problems with the law. He suggested that the unconstitutional portions of Amendment 54 could be discarded, “leaving behind a meaningful enactment, albeit reduced in scope.”

In June, Lemon said the bill both chilled participation in the political process generally and attempted to outlaw it outright for certain groups.

“It’s not a close case,” said Lemon from the bench after hearing closing arguments. “Where First Amendment freedoms are involved, the state has got to [demonstrate] a compelling interest. All we’ve got here is a presumption of corruption and there is no case law to support restricting First Amendment rights based on presumption.”

Lemon further agreed that the amendment unconstitutionally attacked the rights of organized labor in particular.

“It’s obvious from the language of the amendment … that unions have had their rights to participate in the political process completely obliterated and not based on any conduct but simply because of their status as unions, simply because of who they are.”

Lemon agreed with former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky, also an attorney for the plaintiffs, that the amendment sought to drastically fight corruption that didn’t seem to be a problem in Colorado.

Laws in Connecticut and New Jersey, for example, said Dubofsky, limit campaign contributions contractors can make only to officials who can directly influence the terms of contracts. To attempt to do more than that is mere fishing and opens up all variety of legal complications and questions of enforceability. There must be solid evidence of actual corruption to make such a leap. She said that there simply is no such evidence in Colorado — no evidence of pay-to-play corruption and no evidence even of the appearance of pay-to-play corruption.

Dubofsky welcomed the Supreme Court decision today.

“[The decision] overturned an overbroad and unconstitutional law. Amendment 54 would have restricted the political speech of thousands of individual Coloradans and organizations, and we are pleased that the Supreme Court agreed.”

Law Week has posted the Supreme Court’s opinion and dissent online.

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The Judge ruled, however, that the aims were too muddled to pass as law. She said that the sloppy language of the amendment placed too high a burden on people it sought to govern. She also described the way the amendment targeted unions as “curious and problematic.”

Passed by 51 percent of Colorado voters last November, Amendment 54 restricted campaign contributions by government contractors and their relatives. The amendment’s conservative backers, including Independence Institute President Jon Caldara, billed it as a move to fight corruption, but opponents argued it targeted labor unions unjustly and that the murky law the amendment created and the harsh penalties it put in place unnecessarily chilled participation in the political process across the board.

Excerpts:

Amendment 54 is Unconstitutionally Vague.

The First Amendment demands “specificity in a law so that individuals may assess the
burden on their rights to free speech and free association and make informed decisions before acting.”

[...]

The language, “to cease making, causing to be made, or inducing by any means, a
contribution, directly or indirectly, on behalf of the contract holder or on behalf of his or her immediate family member and for the benefit of any political party or for the benefit of any candidate for any elected office of the state or any of its political subdivisions” in section 15 is impermissibly vague.

Amendment 54’s Ban on Contributions by Public Sector Unions and their Political Committees is Unconstitutional.

The inclusion of public sector collective bargaining agreements within the definition of
sole source government contracts is curious and problematic; they simply do not fit formally or functionally with the rest of the amendment or its asserted state interests. There is no evidence of any real or perceived threat of corrupt influence of public officials with authority over the award of collective bargaining agreements.

[...]

unlike a business, which can avoid the prohibitions of Amendment 54 by refraining from sole source contracting, a public employee union cannot escape Amendment 54’s contribution ban, except by refraining from fulfilling its basic mission: the exclusive
representation of public employees.

“It’s not a close case,” said Lemon from the bench in June after hearing four hours of closing arguments.

“Where First Amendment freedoms are involved, the state has got to [demonstrate] a compelling interest. All we’ve got here is a presumption of corruption and there is no case law to support restricting First Amendment rights based on presumption.”

Lemon further agreed that the amendment unconstitutionally attacked the rights of organized labor in particular.

“It’s obvious from the language of the amendment … that unions have had their rights to participate in the political process completely obliterated and not based on any conduct but simply because of their status as unions, simply because of who they are.”

The state Supreme Court will likely rule on the Constitutional questions raised in the case that led to the injunction.

The case against the amendment was argued by Mark Grueskin, Doug Friednash and former state Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky.

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(photo/k. Bacongco/Flickr)

Referendum O, a bipartisan attempt to make it more difficult to amend Colorado’s state constitution, didn’t rank among the top controversial ballot initiatives last year. The initiatives that generated heat included one on affirmative-action discrimination and one on the rights of the unborn, which were controversial in part because many voters don’t even believe there are such things as affirmative-action discrimination and the rights of the unborn.

The ballot itself, though, was the longest in the country and powerful evidence for voters that the state’s initiative process has grown unwieldy, resulting in a torrent of initiatives cluttering the constitution unnecessarily with amendments, some well crafted and some terribly written, creating legal battles and generating widespread suspicion of abuse.

Yet Referendum O failed to pass.

Supporters concluded that the referendum aimed at streamlining the ballots fell an ironic victim to voter fatigue.

“There were 14 initiatives on the ballot … People were exhausted and they just said no,” Democratic State Rep. Lois Court of Denver, a longtime advocate of initiative reform, told the Colorado Independent last spring. “It’s a complex issue. People have lives… We have to approach reform cyclically.”

Back to work

The groups behind Ref O have wasted little time restarting the process.

One of those groups is the business advocacy organization Colorado Concern. Executive Director Janice Sinden said in an interview that Ref O supporters have already secured financial commitments to relaunch a campaign for 2010 and that they have learned a great deal from their efforts last year.

“About a month-and-a-half before the election, we did a survey of about 600 households,” she said. “One thing we learned is that, after we talked to people, their understandings changed. We learned you can move on this topic. We saw that education is everything.”

Based on data from that survey and on community meetings held this year by Ref O supporters, Sinden said that voters generally agree it should be more difficult than it is now to change the state constitution.

Referendum O would encourage citizens to propose updates or changes to the state law codes instead of to the state constitution. It would require only a “simple majority” of votes to pass statutory law, for example, but a “super majority” dispersed through every district in the state to pass constitutional law. It would also mandate an early public commenting period to accompany any proposed constitutional amendments.

Colorado Concern and other Ref O supporters were criticized by the conservative Independence Institute last year for supporting reform of the ballot-initiative process, which the institute argues is a more pure form of democracy. Like many organizations on the left and the right, the Institute sees ballot lawmaking as an important way to work around legislators who might be beholden to special interests and also reluctant to vote against reforms that might diminish their power or pay, for example.

Sinden said her organization was prompted by what it saw as an obvious need.

“It’s not a partisan issue. Right now we have lawsuits coming from Amendment 41 and Amendment 54 — [amendments] that have had great unintended consequences. We supported the ideas behind those amendments. We’re big supporters of voters making law. But that law must be vetted so that it works properly, and that’s why statutory change is better.”

Constitutional law is very difficult to fix, she said, echoing people like constitutional law expert Doug Friednash, who this week was a member of a team of attorneys that won an injunction against Amendment 54. That amendment, passed in November, sought to restrict campaign contributions and prevent corruption but was so muddled and reaching that the court found it abridged first amendment freedoms.

The new model campaign

The “new model” campaign for Ref O, as Sinden refers to it, is being orchestrated in part by Colorado’s Future, an organization dedicated to improving public policy. Director Brenda Morrison said the group is holding regional meetings where civic leaders consider questions concerning the ballot-initiative process and constitutional change.

“It can just work better for public policy to grow from personal relationships rather than traditional policy campaigns,” Morrison said.

And finding civic leaders is easy, she said.

“You walk into a town like Sterling and you ask people on the street. Everyone knows the people who have worked hard for their community and who are dedicated to improving it. It’s not about Republicans and Democrats. It’s about leaders.”

Morrison said they hold meetings of roughly 10 people, who are then tasked with holding larger meetings and appointing people to continue the process.

“It beats spending $6 million to $8 million on a cold campaign … and it’s just better in a lot of ways. People engage in the issue,” said Morrison.

“Take a bigger town, like Colorado Springs. There, the north side is completely different than the south side. We’ll hold three or four initial meetings there. The leaders in each of the meetings will have greater impact. They’ll be totally different kind of people in the north and in the south.”

If you’re talking about issues and solutions and not about politics, said Morrison, then the point is to find out what people really think, on both sides of town.

(Photo/Monocle, Flickr)

Passed by 51 percent of Colorado voters last November, Amendment 54 restricted campaign contributions by government contractors and their relatives. The amendment’s conservative backers, including Independence Institute President Jon Caldara, billed it as a move to fight corruption, but opponents argued it targeted labor unions unjustly and that the murky law the amendment created and the harsh penalties it put in place unnecessarily chilled participation in the political process across the board.

“It’s not a close case,” said Lemon from the bench after hearing four hours of closing arguments. “Where First Amendment freedoms are involved, the state has got to [demonstrate] a compelling interest. All we’ve got here is a presumption of corruption and there is no case law to support restricting First Amendment rights based on presumption.”

Lemon further agreed that the amendment unconstitutionally attacked the rights of organized labor in particular.

“It’s obvious from the language of the amendment … that unions have had their rights to participate in the political process completely obliterated and not based on any conduct but simply because of their status as unions, simply because of who they are.”

Speaking to reporters after the ruling, Mark Grueskin, who represented the unions in the suit, exhibited visible relief.

“It’s over,” he said. “Amendment 54 remains a part of the constitution but it will not be enforced. [The amendment] was legal duct tape for certain businesses and nonprofits. Its aim was to tell specific interests to be quiet about politics.”

Lemon will write a formal injunction in the coming weeks. Her ruling will likely be appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court.

Neither of the high-profile supporters of Amendment 54, Caldara and Tom Lucero — who acted as spokesman for the amendment last year and who is now running against U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey in the state’s 4th Congressional District seat — were in court for the ruling.

Legal absurdities

In arguing against the amendment, Grueskin was accompanied by Doug Friednash and former state Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky.

Dubofsky argued Amendment 54 was unconstitutional because of its overly broad applications. She compared it to laws passed in other states to combat “pay to play” style corruption, demonstrating how those laws remain mostly unchallenged because they possess a more “legitimate sweep.”

Laws in Connecticut and New Jersey, she said, limit campaign contributions contractors can make only to officials who can directly influence the terms of the contract. To attempt to do more than that, she suggested, is mere fishing and opens up all variety of legal complications and questions of enforceability. There must be solid evidence of actual corruption to make such a leap. She said that there simply is no such evidence in Colorado — no evidence of pay-to-play corruption and no evidence even of the appearance of pay-to-play corruption.

Lemon at times seemed intent to draw on Dubofsky’s expertise, asking the former justice to elaborate on this area or that area of case law. She nodded in agreement on many of the points Dubofsky raised and shared in a sense of the legal absurdities the amendment might generate.

At one point Lemon asked Dubofsky whether one of the plaintiffs in the case, Denver Center for the Performing Arts CEO Daniel Ritchie, would be banned from donating money to his own campaign if he were to run for office.

“Well, yes,” said Dubofsky. “It appears so.”

Lemon nodded in agreement and wrinkled her forehead.

Short on specifics

It was on this point that Lemon later extracted the shocking statement from attorneys for the state appointed to defend the amendment that, indeed, from the most basic point of view, the amendment could be seen as illegally infringing rights.

Ritchie could be banned from contributing to his own campaign as well as from encouraging his family members to contribute to his campaign, conceded the attorney.

“In a literal reading of the amendment … yes, forbidding him to contribute to his own campaign is probably unconstitutional.”

The state’s lawyer, Maurie Knaizer, was forced on several occasions to attempt to steer the court away from the actual and often contradictory language of the amendment and toward the alleged intent of the amendment. To that end, he parsed words, suggesting that it might be legal for contractors to “encourage” contributions but illegal for them to “induce” them. He said that what the amendment sought to prevent in banning contributions by contractors to any political candidates at all was “circumvention,” by which he said contractors might influence some officeholders through contact with other officeholders.

But the argument mostly fell apart upon insistence by Lemon on specifics. She asked for examples, even hypothetical examples, that the court might find compelling. These never fully materialized in the discussion.

“I’m not worried about my own confusion,” the judge said in examining one particularly dense sentence included in the amendment. “I’m worried about the confusion among all the people giving money on whom the hammer of this law will come down.”

In comments that came with her ruling, Lemon said she saw no benefit to the state that would come of banning political participation in the form of campaign contributions. The amendment seeks not to limit but to ban participation, which is a step too far, she said, adding that at the heart of the amendment is only the mere conjecture of corruption.

Asked about the state’s case, Greuskin said he thought the “state put on as vigorous a defense as you could make for an amendment written this poorly.”

Photo/Miss_Colleen, Flickr)

“We’re such a die-hard initiative state,” said state Rep. Lois Court, a Denver Democrat who has been watching the ballot initiative process in Colorado for the past two decades. “We believe strongly in direct democracy here … but the initiative process needs fixing.”

Court says the state’s infamous monster ballots, where lists of candidates are supplemented by growing numbers of complicated paragraph-titles describing proposed laws, are just a symbol.

“We just make way too much law in Colorado. That’s the basics of it. And it’s not the best way to make law.”

When “direct democracy” doesn’t work
Court says that Colorado may have finally reached a tipping point on the issue and that citizens may be ready to accept reform. Amendments like the state’s famous Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights or TABOR, which strictly shapes how lawmakers can raise revenue and complicates stand-alone constitutional and statutory spending requirements, like Amendment 23, exemplify the problem.

“It’s a fundamental question about the kind of government the founders of the country established. They designed a democratic republic, where the people have the ultimate sovereignty but where the people elect representatives to make decisions in their place.

“If we in Colorado agree on that, then we can agree also that we are now struggling to function according to that design. Right now we’re at a bit of loggerheads. As lawmakers, on so many issues our hands are tied and our ability to make government work is increasingly diminished.”

State lawmakers address petition fraud
Court has sponsored a ballot-initiative reform bill, H.B. 1326, with House Speaker Terrance Carroll this month, legislation that would better clarify the enigmatic initiative process and restore integrity by preventing fraud. The strong bipartisan support for the bill underlines a growing consensus among leaders in the state that “direct democracy” here — where laws are passed by voters at the ballot box rather than by elected officials in the legislature — has become a problem.

Most analysts agree that fraud is tainting the petition process, where signatures are gathered in support of placing initiatives on the ballot. Indeed, petitioning problems have been widely reported, some of the instances glaring. At a hearing in March, Carroll and Court introduced their reform bill with video of a 14-year-old girl being paid to gather signatures in clear violation of several of the state’s laws. A long list of examples of forged signatures and faked state residencies colored the hearing.

But the problem goes well beyond petition fraud.

Citizen-initiated constitutional amendments cause more problems
“The core problem here is just how easy it is to amend the state constitution,” said Doug Friednash, one of the state’s top constitutional attorneys who has been hired to contest a series of laws made through the initiative process.

Statutory law — law mostly written by legislators to clarify or help carry out government responsibilities — can be changed, updated, strengthened or weakened through layered vetting processes, which include public debate and review by the state’s Legal Services attorneys. That’s the kind of law voters should be encouraged to propose, according to Court and Friednash.

By contrast, once citizens vote to amend the constitution, it’s much more difficult to address any subsequent problems.

“You don’t want to make constitutional changes without seriously vetting the proposals,” Friednash said. “If there are fundamental problems [with an amendment], we’re basically stuck with it. We can’t fix it.”

Friednash is presently representing anti-Amendment 54 plaintiffs challenging the so-called clean government amendment passed last November, which concerns campaign contributions and, according to supporters of the amendment, aims to combat pay-to-play political corruption. The action following the amendment’s passage is a sort of suspended animation, as the amendment goes into effect at the same time the suit to prevent it goes forward.

Ballot measures have become tools of special interests
Campaign finance-related corruption is exactly the kind of complicated topic best addressed through statutes not constitutional amendments, according to Jennie Drage Bowser, an elections expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures and a member of a special Initiative and Referendum task force put together by the NCSL in 2002.

“Legislators and initiative proponents really should work together. Proponents who have an idea should get in touch with lawmakers. Nine out of ten times [proponents don’t] ask lawmakers what they think or how they think it would be best to approach the issue.”

Bowser says legislators and legislative staff are in office basically to work on the often-complex issues that concern proponents and to introduce solid legislation on behalf of constituents.

“Lawmakers have all of these resources at their disposal,” she said. “They can lean on institutional memory, case law. They can get experts in the building to help write law based on what the proponent has in mind.”

Bowser says the explosion in popularity of the initiative process coincided with a political tension that rose up in the fractiously partisan 1990s, a tension that continues to this day. And that process has steered citizens away from lawmakers, who they see as gatekeepers who will thwart their plans.

“You saw that antagonism grow in the Clinton years. All of the sudden, you have mutual antipathy where you should have cooperation.”

You also have special interests, she said, organizations and movements that use the process to circumvent legislative scrutiny.

“Advocates of the initiative process will argue that the role of special interests is exaggerated. But that’s not what we found [on the NCSL task force]. On the left and the right, if you follow the money, you will see that a lot of the ideas originate outside the state.”

Anti-abortion and anti-gay initiative campaigns of the 1990s in Colorado, for example, were organized and bankrolled by the national Christian Coalition. Although there’s nothing illegal about that, it goes against the conception of direct democracy that wins the support of citizens.

“Initiatives are often not what you would typically consider the result of a ‘grassroots’ movement,” Bowser said. “It’s worth seriously considering whether that’s how you want laws and policies created in your state.”

The NCSL task force Bowser contributed to included advisers from many areas of expertise and across the political spectrum. In the end, it recommended against states adopting the initiative process. It concluded that the initiative was now often a tool of special interests; that the parties looking to make law through the process were often anonymous, their motives unclear, their proposals shielded against routine debate, deliberation and compromise; that there weren’t enough checks and balances built into the process; and that the laws made through the ballot box often hampered the ability to develop policy in a “comprehensive manner,” where proposed law didn’t end up contradicting or unnecessarily complicating existing law.

(Photo/Keith Bacongco, Flickr)

And to Poundstone, the change Colorado needs comes in the form of a ballot initiative she’s co-sponsoring that would drastically limit state revenue by slashing taxes and fees. The plan, which is making its way through the review process on its way to the 2010 ballot, stands in stark opposition to the stimulus-spending mantra coming out of Washington, D.C.

The Colorado initiative is alarming at least two state lawmakers who have examined it. Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, said the initiative would “end government as we know it.” And House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, suggested it would move the state down the road to anarchy.

Despite the sweeping ambition of Poundstone’s “change” initiative and the fact that it’s written in the kind of generalized language sure to draw lawsuits, the only real hurdle it faces on its way toward the Colorado Constitution is the need to secure the roughly 76,000 citizen signatures it takes to make it onto the ballot and then win a majority of votes on Election Day.

The Poundstone initiative exemplifies a problem that has increasingly plagued the state in recent years. Constitutional lawyers agree with Solicitor General Dan Domenico, who says the state’s “very liberal policy” regarding ballot initiatives all but guarantees legal battles by drawing increasing numbers of proposals and then not vetting them properly. This past election, Colorado printed the longest ballot in the country, passing famously lax Oregon and California with a list of 14 amendments and initiatives, fueling concerns that the state is becoming, in effect, a national legal testing ground, where laws can be relatively easily placed on the books to generate precedent and momentum for movements of all stripes.

Constitutional Amendment 54, for example, a so-called clean government amendment voted into law in November that mimics anti-corruption laws passed through the legislatures in New Jersey and Connecticut, has been the subject of two lawsuits that hinge on what plaintiff attorneys call the amendment’s “sloppy language.” The shoddy architecture of Amendment 54, the attorneys contend, will have untold consequences and would have been fixed had it been drawn up in the usual fashion by lawmakers. Doug Friednash, who represents one group of plaintiffs challenging the amendment, said the sloppy language of the amendment and the fact that it passed as a ballot initiative raises questions about the motivation of the authors.

“[Amendment 54] looks more like a political missile than something designed to address a serious public policy issue,” said Friednash. “People say it was designed to hit unions. That may well be true. … Connecticut dealt with the pay-to-play issue by drafting a tight law that was upheld in federal court. [Connecticut] Gov. [John] Rowland’s conviction on corruption stands as a result. But 54 wasn’t drafted narrowly like that to serve a compelling state issue.”

The Poundstone initiative isn’t drafted narrowly either.

“Government would tax the air you breathe if it could, and if they can’t find a way to do that, then they’d go around and do it with a fee,” Poundstone said in defense of the initiative.

Her initiative proposes to slash income taxes as well as sales and rebate taxes and all variety of fees on transportation and communications, focusing particularly on vehicle and phone fees. But the state’s attorneys assigned to review the initiative critiqued its language at length, pointing to undefined words and muddy phrases that could swamp the state in exactly the kind of debate currently raging over Amendment 54 in court filings but also over Senate Bill 228 in the General Assembly. The latter is a budget reform bill that would repeal the 1992 Arveschoug-Bird provision that requires any surplus of state revenues be devoted to transportation and capital construction projects.

Even a cursory reading of the Legal Services review of the Poundstone initiative suggests the vast field of legal battles that may be on the horizon.

Legal Services attorneys ask Poundstone and her ballot initiative co-sponsor Jeff Gross:

With regard to the “Telecommunications” section of the proposed initiative:

a. Are you proposing that the only fee on telecommunications be a 911 fee to be charged at the 2009 rate in perpetuity? If not, what other telecommunication fees, taxes, or charges are allowed to be levied under the provisions of the proposed initiative? Would this include a franchise fee?

b. Do you anticipate that the costs of providing 911 services will increase to the extent that eventually the fees at the 2009 rates will not be sufficient to cover the costs of providing the 911 services? If so, how would 911 service providers cover their costs so that these services may be provided in the future?

[…]

e. Are the charges on “telephone, pager, cable, television, radio, Internet, computer, satellite, or other telecommunication service customer accounts” all charges imposed by a state or local governmental entity? Are any of these charges imposed by the federal government or by private entities? If so, can the proposed initiative require that these charges no longer be imposed?

The questions in the vehicle section seem equally basic in the realm of lawmaking.

With regard to the “Vehicle” section of the proposed initiative:

a. Is it your intent that the reduction in specific ownership taxes apply to all vehicles, including commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles?

b. The proposed initiative requires that all specific ownership taxes decrease in “four equal yearly steps”. What do you mean by “yearly”? Is this a calendar year or a fiscal year?

c. How do you envision the reduction in “four equal yearly steps” to occur in practice? Currently, specific ownership tax is calculated based on a certain percentage of the value of the vehicle, and the percentage decreases periodically based on the age of the vehicle. Who will determine how much tax a vehicle owner owes under the provisions of the proposed initiative?

d. What is the purpose of reducing the amount of the tax to $2 or $1 on vehicles, rather than simply eliminating the tax? Would the cost of administering and collecting such a small amount exceed the amount of revenue produced?

e. What do you mean by “other vehicles”? Is your intent to refer to used vehicles? If not, to what type of other vehicles are you referring in the proposed initiative?

[…]

g. What does “and on $10,000, reached in four equal yearly steps, of sales prices per vehicle” mean? Does the phrase “All state and local taxes shall cease” apply to that phrase?

h. In connection with question g. above, is it your intent that state and local sales taxes not be paid on more than $10,000 of the value of a new vehicle when sold? Or, are sales taxes to cease on $10,000 of the sales price of a vehicle (i.e., $10,000 of the purchase price is exempt)? If not, what is your intended purpose? If this is your intent, would you consider clarifying this with additional language? For example, that sentence could be broken up into two sentences as follows…

Poundstone and Gross — whom Poundstone called a “gentleman caller” from Kersey — have already rejected the nine pages of suggestions prepared by the state’s Legal Services attorneys, in which the above critiques appear. Gross, Poundstone said, only made minor changes in the initiative. He didn’t return calls for comment.

Poundstone and Gross submitted their final version of the initiative to the state last week — a third version, effectively unchanged from the original.

The anti-tax duo will take the initiative as-is first to a Review and Comment hearing next week and then to a Title Board hearing, both mere formalities, as the secretary of state and attorney general’s offices have readily admitted.

“It’s up to the voters to judge the merits,” said a Legislative Services attorney who wished to remain anonymous. “We treat any and all proposed initiatives the same — this one and all of them. We’re not gatekeepers.”