Two months ago, the Appointments and Ordinances Committee (five people) of the Greenfield City Council decided to make “no change” in the current city charter rules regarding the rights of voters to propose a citizen initiative. The council chose to put nothing on its March agenda. This means the full council — without any discussion — wants voters to gather nearly 1,000 signatures from certified voters just to bring a new idea to the ballot.
Despite many comments from voters, and in this newspaper, the council has done nothing to fix the broken citizen initiative process. Ignore the voters long enough, and they will go away. It’s “government by the people, against the people.”
Unlike the citizen referendum issue, which went to the ballot last November, the council has made no move to put citizen initiatives on the ballot, so all voters can decide this issue. Perhaps our council does not want the voters to decide, because last November they rejected the council’s plan to make referendums harder to get on the ballot.
How many more months will we have to wait for the council to hear the people knocking on the door? We want the fundamental citizen right to bring new ideas to our legislature — and ultimately to all voters — without a lot of red tape and delay. We are not going to go away.
Please do what the people voted for last November!
Gary Hallowell
Greenfield