Gambling Referendums Prompt Talk Of Change - 2004-01-03
Say the words "citizen initiative" to anti-nuclear activist Phil Merletti, and his thoughts turn to long hours in the cold, gathering signatures while plenty of spare pens remain warm and ready inside his jacket.
To Dennis Bailey, whose firm engineered the defeat of an Indian casino initiative last month, those words have become synonymous with special interest groups using bottomless bank accounts to bypass the Legislature and sell Maine voters a proverbial bill of goods.
Despite what many agree are the system's flaws, neither man - and very few Maine lawmakers for that matter - would call for an end to the popular mechanism that allows citizens to place legislation directly on the ballot.
Read the full story at GamblingMagazine.com 
