CHEYENNE —If you add up the number of ballot questions Wyoming voters approved over the years, the number is mighty puny.
This was the intent of the legislators who passed the initiative and referendum law in 1968.
Jealously protecting their rights to make law, they made the initiative process super tight.
First of all, Wyoming’s initiative process does not allow changes to the state’s constitution. Second, the requirement for voter signatures is formidably stringent.
Bagful Of Money
This means the sponsor better have a bagful of money to hire professional signature gatherers to get their his or her cause before the voters.
I think that is what makes the entire initiative process undemocratic.
Only big industry or extremely wealthy individuals have the big bucks to get anything on the ballot.
At any rate, most of the proposed initiatives that fizzled did so for lack of meeting the voter signature requirement.
Thus when you find a year when two Wyoming initiatives were adopted by residents it is a rarity.
Triple Trailers
It happened, though in 1992, as the result of the fight over triple trailers on Wyoming highways by two big well-funded industries —trucking and railroads.
The trucking association favored the triples while the railroad were hotly opposed.
The truckers argued that the triple trailers were safe and would reduce the wear and tear on the highways. Not allowing them would mean the loss of some trucking business.
The railroads disagreed and hammered on the safety issue; there also was the issue of competition with the trucking industry which was intense at the time.
Public hearings on proposed legislation to ban triples brought out the drivers who claimed they were already freaked out by the armada of single trailers pounding away on I-80.
The critics claimed the triples would make the driving on I-80 even more spine-chilling that it was already.
Lots Of Misinformation
Looking back, a lot of misinformation was being tossed about by the critics and the railroads.
Sheila Foertsch, who was on the staff of the the Wyoming Trucking Association at the time and went on to become an award-winning director, said last week in a phone interview that the the railroads used scare tactics to kill the triples.
The railroads, she said, held a series of town hall meetings in communities in southern Wyoming and they pulled out all the stops.
At any rate a Cheyenne attorney, John Rogers filed the petition for an initiative to ban triple trailers.
In response, Tom Jones, a former legislator whose family owned a trucking firm in Park county, filed a second initiative. This one required railroads to adopt a number of safety measures.
Voters Approved
Voters approved both ballot issues which were the first to make the cut since the initiative process began.
Foertsch said that one misconception was that a triple trailer would be the size of three regular trailers tied together. That was not the case.
Today, she said there are trailers on the highways in Wyoming that are longer than the triple trailers were, because of highway regulations.
In the wake of the triples defeat, two major trucking companies planned to transfer some of their operations from Cheyenne to Denver, resulting in a loss of about 240 trucking jobs, according to internet sources.
Industry officials said that the triple trailer ban may have been one reason for the move but probably was not the only one.
——————————————————
Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan.net
