You wouldn’t normally think that Measures 48 (to limit state spending) and 45 
(to limit terms in the legislature) have anything in common. In fact they do and 
his name is Howard Rich, a New York multimillionaire real estate developer who, 
so far as I know, has never been to Oregon. Rich financed more than 85 percent 
of the expensive paid signature gathering on both initiative measures spending 
over a Million dollars just to get the measures on the ballot. 

Measure 48, “TABOR” (so called Tax Payers’ Bill of Rights), was tried in Colorado 
with disastrous results. Colorado’s school funding went from among the best to 47th
and its economy grew the slowest of all western states during the period TABOR 
was in effect. Last year Colrado Governor Bill Owens, a Republican who previously 
had supported TABOR easily convinced Colorado voters to suspend the measure to 
give the state a chance to recover. As Colorado discovered, the state will have 
to reduce necessary things like road and bridge repair, funding schools and the 
Oregon Health Plan. Colorado’s prisons are overcrowded because of TABOR. Oregon 
already has only half the State Troopers we need. Measure 48 will make it worse.
TABOR is opposed by major business groups, doctors, teachers, firefighters, the 
Oregon PTA, the Oregon State Police Officer’s Association and many many others. It 
is supported by Don McIntire who told us Measure 5 would not hurt schools (it did, 
big time). Don and the few other supporters call TABOR the “Rainy Day Measure” 
even though it does NOT set up a rainy day fund, as he admitted to the Secretary 
of State in a letter.

Measure 45 limits terms in the legislature to six years in the House and eight 
years in the Senate for no more than 14 years total. Mr. Rich successfully sold 
Oregon on this idea in 1992. It was thrown out by the Oregon Supreme Court in 
2002, but it had already damaged our legislature’s capacity to do the people’s 
business. We are just now beginning to recover. Government is a complicated 
business. Like any other complex profession, experience is usually important. 
I don’t want my heart surgery done by a surgeon who has never done heart surgery
before. How about you? Writing laws and intervening with the bureaucracy on
behalf of constituents (something I do every week) requires judgment honed by
experience. Even without term limits most legislators don’t serve long enough
to get really good at it. The few who do become the memory for the rest of what
we tried before and why it did or did not work. Many of our most important
problems require long study and long term solutions. Term limits force
legislators to adopt a short term view, increase partisanship, decrease
efficiency and lengthen legislative sessions (the last two were the longest
ever). The last three Speakers of the House each had only two regular sessions’
experience before having to lead the complex enterprise of a legislative
session. That inexperience showed. Besides, we already have term limits- they 
are called elections. A broad coalition has formed to oppose term limits: AFL-CIO, 
Associated Oregon Loggers, Stand for Children, the Oregon Business Association, 
teachers, firefighters, the League of Women Voters, and many many more. The 
supporters include Mr. Rich’s Oregon cabal, “Committee to Restore Oregon
Term Limits” and virtually no one else.

Howard Rich also supported similar measures in a bunch of other states he probably 
has never visited. Courts in Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan and Missouri have 
thrown several of Mr. Rich’s measures off their ballots this year because of 
illegal signature gathering tactics. His paid signature gatherers, many of them 
the same folks who gathered them in Oregon, misrepresented the measures or tricked 
voters into signing one measure when they thought they were signing another in all 
those states. In Montana a judge said, “The court finds that the signature-gathering 
process was permeated by a pervasive and general pattern and practice of deceit, 
fraud and procedural non-compliance.” In Oregon similar complaints have been filed 
with the Secretary of State, but our rules do not allow disqualification of the
measure from the ballot, only a fine. 

We need to do more to protect our legitimate initiative process from out of state 
special interests and those who would commit fraud against the voters, but that is 
a topic for another day.