Editorial November 15, 2003
	Why do our political elected officials believe that the people are smart enough to elect them but are too dumb to write and enact initiative referenda themselves? The Island Watchdog Association spent considerable time and effort collecting the necessary signatures to create an initiative petition as provided for by the Middletown Town Charter. The Town Council vehemently opposed this proposal, asserted that the proponents had been deceitful in promoting the petition, and suggested that the voters were ignorant as to what they were signing. The Town Solicitor has declared that the petition is improperly drafted and, if enacted, would "create many more problems than it will solve." So the Council unanimously voted against the petition and as President William Flynn said "will have to educate the people in order to defeat this legislation." This is not the only option that the Council could have pursued. The Town Council could have instructed the Solicitor to draft an alternative ordinance that would have been technically proper and not flawed. The Council then could have adopted this alternative ordinance thereby making it law immediately and thereby satisfying the wishes of the thousand citizens who had signed the petition. While it is true that the adoption of an alternative ordinance would still require an election of the original petition as required by the Town Charter, that election would be a slam dunk. The voters would simply reject it since the alternative ordinance would be in place and presumingly doing what the citizens wanted. However, the Council's rejection of the petition without adopting an alternative now pits the current law against the "flawed initiative petition" in an election next year and the Council, as President Flynn says, must "educate" the people.