Fools Over Stadiums?

To use a sports analogy, when you’re handed the ball 1st and goal at the 1 yard line, you’re probably going to score the touchdown you need unless you do something stupid like fumble two plays until it’s 3rd and goal at the 20.

Yesterday marked a dubious date in the ongoing saga of Schools Over Stadiums trying to let Nevada’s taxpayers vote for a referendum on the $380M of public money earmarked for a new A’s stadium on the Las Vegas Strip. As of yesterday the deadline for submitting the necessary signatures was 2 months away, as June 26th is when Schools Over Stadiums must provide 102,586 signatures evenly distributed across 4 congressional districts (25,647 from each).

A good mantra for Schools Over Stadiums would be, “Just get it on the ballot.” Nevada voters appear eager to pass a referendum, with a recent poll suggesting that 52% oppose the public funding, 32% support it, and 16% are currently “undecided”.

What those numbers suggest is that a referendum would pass pretty resoundingly at around 60%/40%, but given that historically undecided voters generally vote against public taxes when they vote at all, it’s possible the referendum would actually garner more like 2:1 support. It would only need 50%+1 votes to pass.

Meanwhile, across the country referendums on using taxpayer money to build stadiums have been passing, while bills to use taxpayer money to build stadiums have been failing. Again and again and again. Most recently, on April 3rd a bid to earmark public money for a downtown stadium that would house the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals (through a sales tax) was defeated at the polls with a resounding 58% voting “no”.

What voters can’t do is to get a referendum on the ballot in the first place. That was the rather basic job Schools Over Stadiums undertook and were handed 1st and goal at the 1. All they had to do was not to mess it up entirely.

First came a blunder that while hard to believe was potentially just a minor setback. On November 6th, a judge ruled that the petition did not pass legal muster and needed to be rewritten to be more thorough and less confusing. The judge, James Russell, even noted that he, as a voter, is “probably more passionate towards building schools than I am stadiums,” but referendum law requires the full text of the bill to be included and his hands were tied on the ruling.

So you couldn’t figure out how to write a petition that followed the laws of the state, to where a sympathetic judge had no choice but to agree with your opponents? That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but fortunately for Schools Over Stadiums the ruling came down in early November, a good 7.5 months before signatures need to be collected and submitted.

Then comes a blunder that is hard to comprehend. Schools Over Stadiums had two clear choices. One was to just rewrite and submit the petition according to the court’s instructions. Refile it by Thanksgiving and you have 7 months. I’m guessing that so long as the words “schools,” “stadium,” and taxpayer money” were included, the referendum was poised to pass with flying colors.

The second option was to appeal the decision to the Nevada Supreme Court hoping to get the shortened version approved. Schools Over Stadium is probably going to lose the appeal, but even if they “win” they will have squandered 5 of the 7 months and will have less than 2 months to start gathering over 100,000 signatures.

So you lose either way if you appeal and watch nearly 3/4 of the remaining days go by without the chance to start gathering signatures. And that’s the path Schools Over Stadiums chose. They are still waiting for a ruling, which should come any day now, but no matter how the petition winds up being worded Schools Over Stadiums is going to have about 8 weeks, instead of 7 months, to get the qualifying signatures.

Why Schools Over Stadiums is so stuck on how the petition and referendum are worded is beyond me. Just. Get. It. On. The. Ballot. It will pass and it will pass easily. Really the only way it doesn’t is if Schools Over Stadiums bungles the process so thoroughly that it can’t write a legally compliant petition and then can’t give themselves enough time to gather signatures from eager voters just waiting with pen in hand for a chance to block this money from going towards the stadium project.

I keep thinking that knowing the timelines, if Schools Over Stadiums was willing to squander 5 months on the appeal they must know that they have the resources to get 102,000+ signatures in 6-8 weeks. But I don’t actually think that’s true. I think they’re just incredibly disorganized and ignorant of the law, first unaware of how you have to write and submit a petition, probably naive about how long an appeal would take, and then unable to see how little difference it makes how the petition reads.

Taxpayers know what this bill is and are chomping at the bit to pass a referendum if someone can just get a petition in front of them before June 26th and a subsequent measure to vote on in November. Yet somehow, Schools Over Stadiums is managing to find a way not to get it on the ballot by frittering away essential time over wording when a measure worded any which way will very likely get you the signatures and votes you need.

If this is how our teachers approach a basic task and some obvious decisions, it’s no wonder Nevada’s education system is ranked 48th in the country. You had one job and it took two massive blunders to mess it up. Now you’re going to have 6-8 weeks for a task you could have had 7 months to complete — or more if you had known how to write and submit a petition in the first place.

I hope they have the resources to hit the streets and still get it done in a short amount of time. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t have as much faith as I once did that they know what the heck they’re doing.