Lawmakers are considering an amendment to the Utah Constitution that would require more votes when passing a ballot initiative to impose a new tax or raise existing taxes.

Currently, a ballot initiative dealing with any issue, taxes included, needs at least 50% of the vote — under a bill and complimentary resolution sponsored by Rep. Jason Kyle, R-Huntsville, that threshold would increase to 60%.

Initiative Amendments, or HB284, and its companion resolution Statewide Initiatives, or HJR14, both passed the House Government Operations Committee on Wednesday with all three “no” votes coming from the Democrats on the committee.

“This will bring more people to the table and make sure that we have good policy. When we pass legislation through the legislature, we can do it in iterations,” said Kyle during the committee, referring to the various substitutions and amendments lawmakers can make to change a bill.

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, defended the proposal Wednesday, telling reporters that ballot initiatives can sometimes be a flawed approach to enact policy.

“You get something on the ballot and you just have to vote it up or down. You can’t amend it, you can’t substitute it, you can’t discuss it. And sometimes there are mistakes made, things that need to be tweaked,” Adams said.

In the last several years, lawmakers have done just that. Voters passed three ballot initiatives in 2018 to expand Medicaid, legalize medicinal cannabis and create an independent redistricting commission. Lawmakers superseded all three with their own legislation.

That was one of the arguments made from a coalition of groups that met Wednesday morning at the Capitol to condemn the legislation.

“Some lawmakers like to say we’ve had way too many initiatives,” said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters Utah. “From 1952 to 2014 there were 23 ballot initiatives that made it on the ballot, only four passed … we had three in 2018 which the legislature then came in and changed immediately.”

Biele was joined by the ACLU of Utah, Utah Citizen’s Council, the Rural Utah Project, the Alliance for a Better Utah and Better Boundaries to oppose the bill.

Sheryl Allen, a former Utah Republican lawmaker from Bountiful who is now a board member of Better Boundaries, described an “imbalance” in how lawmakers can pass bills compared to the public. Legislative power, she said, should be invested “with two groups — one is the legislature, and one is the people.”

“The fact that there are more than 400 bills passed per session is indicative that it’s not a huge task to pass a bill,” she said.

But passing a ballot referendum? “Absolutely brutal and difficult. Is not equitable with how a bill gets passed in the legislature,” Allen said.

Kyle, during Tuesday’s committee, said the 10% increase wasn’t “insurmountable” — but those speaking during Wednesday’s press conference said it would hamper future ballot initiatives, including TJ Ellerbeck, the Rural Utah Coalition’s executive director, who called Kyle’s legislation “direct attacks on Utahns, rural and urban alike, to participate in our democracy.”

If Kyle’s legislation passes both the House and Senate with a two-thirds majority, the fate of the proposed amendment will be left to Utahns, who can vote on the threshold increase during the 2024 general election.

“When this gets on the ballot this fall, I imagine that people will have their opinion. And if the majority of Utahns want to make it harder for the government to take their money, I imagine they’ll vote that way,” said the bill’s floor sponsor, Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan. “Raising taxes ought to be a really difficult thing to do.”

Democrats during Tuesday’s committee meeting floated the idea of also raising the threshold for tax-related legislation. Kyle and other Republicans gave the idea tacit support, but didn’t actually propose an amendment.

“I would be less opposed to this if we first imposed on ourselves a requirement to get to 60%, but to sit here and say ‘I think we should do this as legislators’ and not actually follow up with anything substantive … does nothing more than continue to erode the confidence the public has in us,” said House Minority Whip Jen Dailey-Provost, D-Salt Lake City.

Under current state law, sponsors need to collect 134,298 signatures of registered Utah voters, while meeting specific signature thresholds in at least 26 of 29 Utah Senate districts.

Utah News Dispatch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news source covering government, policy and the issues most impacting the lives of Utahns.

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