01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 28, 2006

THE PUSH IS ON for voter initiative -- for better or worse -- as increasingly desperate citizens fight for some means to make Rhode Island government more responsive to the general interest and less of a tool of special interests. A poll released last week by Alpha Research Associates, of Providence, found a whopping 91 percent of registered voters would like to see the proposal placed on this November's ballot, and 59 percent would vote for the measure.

Even the blinkered politicians of Rhode Island had to be struck by those numbers. People are clearly unhappy about the Ocean State's uncompetitively high taxes, poor job growth, extraordinarily generous public-employee entitlements, struggling schools, and the arrogance of power displayed by some of those in the inner political circles. Citizens are seeking a way to get the state back on track, and they don't see it in legislative elections alone, which are strongly dominated by the money and manpower of special interests, limiting choices.

Unfortunately, voter initiative is an often crude way to govern -- as we have seen in some states, where majorities used it as a bludgeon to beat down the minority, by outlawing gay marriage. The truth is, vocal minorities with good lobbyists tend to be better and more fairly represented in the sausage making of the legislative process.

On the other hand, when some well-financed special interests -- notably those represented in the Ocean State by union bosses Frank Montanaro and George Nee -- call almost all the shots, representative government can be just as oppressive. Note that Messrs. Montanaro and Nee, among others, are aggressively opposing voter initiative.

Obviously, Rhode Island would be best served if its legislators would try to strike a balance, and begin to focus on what would generally benefit everyone in the state. That is the moderate alternative to a citizen uprising and voter initiative.

House leaders have, in fact, taken some steps in that direction. Speaker William Murphy is pushing a measure to bring Rhode Island income taxes more in line with those of Massachusetts (Senate President Joseph Montalbano and his crew, unfortunately, are resisting this crucial reform). And Mr. Murphy has reformed House rules to increase public accountability and essentially eliminate voting fraud by his own members.

But that should be just the beginning. There are good ideas staring members in the face, if legislative leaders would permit a vote on them:

H7123 would require Rhode Island to follow the example of New Hampshire and Vermont, in letting citizens immediately and easily call up, on the Internet, the voting record of any legislator. At present, Rhode Island citizens can only extract a legislator's voting record from the tallies of each bill, a laborious process.

H6814 would require cities and towns to post on the Web their budgets, charters, and collective-bargaining agreements.

H7733 would require that, before ratification of a collective-bargaining agreement, the public would have to be notified of its principal terms and projected cost. That would give citizens a much better sense of how their tax dollars are being spent.

H7580 would remove the pensions from local collective bargaining, as they are from state collective bargaining. That would tend to limit the little-observed deals at the local level that end up driving property taxes into the stratosphere.

H6802 and H6803 would require the Joint Committee on Legislative Services, the administrative arm of the legislature, to be regularly audited, with the results posted on the Web. That would let citizens easily figure out how $37 million of their tax dollars are being spent each year.

The above ideas are sponsored by Rep. Jim Davey (R.-Cranston), who knows something about bad government. He worked for U.S. District Judge John Sirica during the Watergate cover-up trial of Richard Nixon's aides.

The question, of course, is whether those bills can ever see the light of day in the General Assembly. Citizens can call Mr. Murphy at (401) 222-2466 and Majority Leader Gordon Fox at 222-2447 and ask them to make sure the relevant committees allow a vote instead of simply setting the bills aside. Why shouldn't members at least go on record about these ideas?

Obviously, many of the special interests on Smith Hill believe, with good reason, that citizen involvement is unhelpful to them. But legislators should realize that too little public involvement in a representative democracy tends to make for very costly government with second-rate services. Ultimately, that hurts everyone who has a stake in the future of Rhode Island: rich and poor; public and private employees; whites and minorities; heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender citizens; men, women and (especially) children. And bottling up citizen outrage, year after year, only works until the bottle explodes.

Edward Achorn is The Journal's deputy editorial-pages editor. His e-mail address is eachorn@projo.com.