Citizens in Charge

In Nevada members of the grassroots group Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) announced that the ballot initiative the group sponsored has hit a financial brick wall. The initiative backed by PLAN has failed to reach the 2010 ballot after securing only 66,000 of the 97,002 signatures they needed. With firms charging as much as a dollar signature to sign petitions, “We just didn’t have the money to pay people” says PLAN’s executive director Bob Fulkerson.

The measure would have raised taxes on Nevada’s hardrock mining industry and was supported by many residents.  Nevada, one of the hardest hit states in the nation’s financial woes, has seen its gold mines booming as the nation’s top producer of the element. The popular initiative would have imposed a 5 percent severance on the industry’s gross earnings.

This isn’t the first hurdle Fulkerson and PLAN have faced with their ballot proposal or in the last few years. Late last year the legality of the proposed initiative was challenged by Nevada Mining Association. The mining lobbyists were not successful in their lawsuit, but it did cause PLAN to rewrite some elements of the measure, which resulted in the scrapping of the 12,000 signatures already collected. This was a huge blow for PLAN which has since decided under their current time constraints to wait until the 2012 ballot to add the initiative.

Read more here from High Country News

Matthew Slaughter is an Intern at Citizens in Charge Foundation