LOS ANGELES — The authors of a California ballot initiative that would restructure public employee pensions said they will commission a legal review of the measure's "title and summary" before gathering the signatures needed to place it on the November 2016 ballot.
Initiative supporters say that Attorney General Kamala Harris used the same "misleading" language favoring labor unions that she used in a prior effort to limit taxpayer spending on public pensions.
Detractors of the initiative proposed for the November 2016 ballot are also quibbling over the language the attorney general's office released Tuesday.
Release of the title and summary language is usually the final step before proponents of a measure can begin gathering signatures.
Former San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio and former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed introduced the initiative in June. Their measure would mandate that future increases in pension benefits for state and local government workers be pre-approved by voters.
This is Reed's second stab at pension reform. He pulled last year's attempt after an unsuccessful legal battle to get Harris to change the title and summary — her office's abbreviated description of measures that go on the ballot.
Supporters said they made a decision to conduct a legal review before they begin collecting signatures to insure it reflects what they termed the "plain English" requirements of the measure.
"Labor unions and the AG's office, as union allies, are playing games with the ballot language," said Dave McCulloch, a DeMaio spokesman.
Supporters are conducting a legal review to make sure the attorney general's office is "complying with election statutes," McCulloch said.
"We will be looking at the first sentence, which is inaccurate, and misleading, and deciding if it is worth a legal challenge," Reed said.
Supporters nonetheless "believe that ultimately, the misleading title and summary will not impact our ability to pass the measure," McCulloch said.
David Low, the head of Californians for Retirement Security, which represents public employee unions, had his own criticism of the attorney general's description.
He thinks it should have mentioned that teachers, nurses, police and firefighters would be among the public employees affected — and that those job categories should be mentioned specifically in the summary.
Supporters are challenging the materials included, as well as the summary and title, in case, legal challenges arise in the future, McCulloch said.
"We just wanted to do a legal review at this point in the process to make sure the summary not only is accurate, but that the summary may give us great benefit long term from a legal standpoint," he said.
"Materials that are developed and presented for ballot measures are reviewed by the courts down the line when approved by voters," he said. "When challenges are presented down the road, the courts do look at materials presented to voters to ascertain what the measure does and does not do."
If it does pass, he said, the measure's authors don't want the language contained in the ballot measure to affect its ability to be implemented in the manner the ballot measure's supporters intended.
"Costly government pension deals are devastating our public services — and this simple initiative gives voters the ability to stop sweetheart and unsustainable pension deals that politicians concoct behind closed doors with government union bosses," Reed and DeMaio said in a joint statement.
Low said the title and summary falls short of describing the chaos and uncertainty that would occur if it were to pass, including the undermining of the financial stability of the state's major retirement systems.
He said, however, that the summary accurately reflects that "this Tea Party-backed measure is a back-door way of repealing Constitutionally-vested and promised rights to retirement security and health care."
He called the measure "extreme," and "doomed to fail."
