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Official: Welfare, Income Tax Reform Should Be Separate Ballot Questions, Not Linked

AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Republican Party will not have to undertake two separate signature drives in order to get its double-pronged citizens' initiative before the voters next year, but Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap is advising the party to divide the issue into two separate ballot questions.

Republican leaders say welfare reform and lowering the state's income tax are linked because they will enhance the prospects for prosperity. Dunlap says the two issues could not be more unrelated.

The good news for Republicans is that they will not have to go through the time-consuming process of circulating two separate petitions in order to gather the necessary signatures required to place their citizen initiative on the ballot in 2016.

Rick Bennett, state chair of the Maine Republican Party, says as soon as the final paperwork is completed, GOP volunteers will begin the process of gathering about 62,000 signatures required to bring the proposed law to the Legislature next spring.

"This about a policy of changing Maine from a state of poverty to a state of prosperity," Bennett says.

The initiative is an attempt to achieve what Gov. Paul LePage could not in the Legislature. It would lower the state's current top income tax rate from 7.95 percent down to 4 percent and usher in numerous welfare reforms, including the elimination of state benefits for legal nonresidents and the banning of state electronic benefit cards for purchases of tobacco, tattoos or foreign wired money transmissions.

It would also require all nondisabled adults to prove they were looking for work before they could receive benefits.

In giving the go-ahead for the party to start gathering signatures, Dunlap also made it clear that he does not see the linkage between welfare and tax reform that Bennett says should be obvious.

"It will probably be broken into different questions for the purpose of the voters voting on the separate issues," Dunlap says. "When we communicated the language drafted by the revisor's office to the petitioners, we informed them of the substance of our deliberations and suggested to them that maybe they contemplate having two separate initiatives so as not to confuse their supporters, because they're very very different and because voters might reasonably have different opinions on the two topics."

But Republicans say the issues are tied and that savings from welfare reform will boost efforts to reduce the income tax.

Before Dunlap and Bennett can even get to a place where one or two questions will be discussed, the Legislature will have an opportunity to weigh in.

Lawmakers could approve the proposal or reject it and send it directly to the voters in the fall. And that could appear on the ballot as one question or two.

The Legislature could also devise a third question that could appear on the ballot as a competing measure.

Before any of that is decided Republicans must gather the required number of approved signatures by February.