Hello clean-air-and-climate friends:

Continuing to shift focus to 2022 and/or 2024. We have not been able to get a major donation or other game-changing development, so although we are still gathering some signatures in “experimental mode”, we are doing so mostly with an eye on future years because the odds of getting on the 2020 ballot are very long and are getting longer by the day. In that vein, here are three items that we’d love to have your feedback on:

Lessons learned from 2020. Here’s a list of ten lessons learned from our effort this year. Please suggest additional lessons, or add comments about this list, either via email (info@DarnAir.org) or on the blog.

Timeline for the Nov 2022 ballot. If we want to get on the Nov 2022 ballot and take maximum advantage of the good-weather months for signature-gathering, two promising options are (1) to file in mid-Feb 2020 and gather signatures from early April 2020 to the end of Dec 2020, or (2) to file in late Dec 2020 and gather signatures from mid-Feb 2021 to early Nov 2021. (See additional details here.) There are advantages and disadvantages to each: for example, Option #1 has the advantage of continuing the momentum we’ve built this year, but Option #2 has the advantage of giving us more time to build our grassroots network (and take a breather!) before taking another swing at the ball. One important question, then is this: Do you see other advantages or disadvantages to these two options? Please chime in via email (info@DarnAir.org) or in the comments section on the blog, and let’s try to be thorough about answering that question before we go too far down the road of trying to determine which option is better.

An extra twist: how to change the proposal? State law says that the Lt Gov must reject a ballot measure application (i.e., not allow it to proceed to signature-gathering) for any proposal that is “substantially similar” to a measure for which signatures were collected in the previous two years, which means we can’t file a measure exactly like our current measure before Nov 2021. As a result, if we’re going to file a measure for the Nov 2022 ballot then we have to make some changes to the proposal. Exactly what kinds of changes are needed to avoid the “substantially similar” problem is a bit unclear (we’ve asked, and the answer was that “substantially similar” is not defined in the statute and so it will be up to the lawyers in the Lt Gov’s office to decide) but the good news is that it should be possible to try different approaches and see whether or not they pass muster. A second important question, then is this: If you were to make changes to the proposal (either big or small), what changes would you make? Again, please chime in via email (info@DarnAir.org) or in the comments section on the blog.