A two step process will be required to create Cascade County: 

1.      Sponsor an Initiative to the Legislature to create law establishing rules for creation of new counties.  This will avoid some of the problems identified by Cascade County effort.  It will require us to collect signatures from 8% of the voters in the 2004 Governor’s election (approximately 250,000 signatures, including a margin) by December 31^st, 2005. 

•        Our plan is to use text from SB 5084/HB1809 from 2001 session or HB1500 from 2005 session as the basis for the initiative

Once an initiative to the Legislature is created, the Legislature must choose one of three options:

–        Legislature can adopt the initiative as proposed

–        Legislature can reject or refuse to act on the proposed initiative, then initiative must be placed on the ballot at the next state general election;

or

–        Legislature can approve an amended version of the proposed initiative; both amended version and original proposal must be placed on the next state general election ballot.

 2. petition to Secretary of State by gathering signatures of roughly 50% of registered voters in new county.  This will mean collecting as many as 300,000 signatures in the new county, but we’ll have two years to do this in and can do this simultaneously with the Initiative drive.

There shall be no territory stricken from any county unless a majority of the voters living in such territory shall petition therefor and then only under such other conditions as may be prescribed by a general law applicable to the whole state.– State Constitution, Art XI, Sec 3.