Legislation sponsored by Representative Denise Provost, a Somerville Democrat, and scheduled for a public hearing yesterday would more than double the number of certified signatures that citizen activists need to put initiative petitions on the statewide ballot, according to Citizens for Limited Taxation, which will testify against the proposal.
In a memo to lawmakers dated yesterday, Chip Faulkner of Citizens for Limited Taxation called the bill “just another in a long list of attempts to kill the initiative petition process in Massachusetts.’’
Last year, state voters settled three ballot questions, passing an initiative petition repealing the state’s application of the 6.25 percent sales tax to retail alcohol purchases and defeating initiative petitions that would have reduced the sales tax to 3 percent and repealed the Chapter 40B affordable housing law.
In his memo, Faulkner attributed efforts to raise the bar for initiative petitions to “some liberal or union-controlled legislators’’ that he said “hate seeing the average citizen put issues on the ballot without bowing and scraping to an unresponsive Legislature.’’
