Measure Would Bar Out-of-Town Money in Humboldt County Races

EUREKA, Calif. — Sky-high redwoods, a fogbound coast and unabashed liberalism: It's the last that drew Ohio transplant John Emig to Humboldt County, where one recent night he cold-called dozens of residents in a campaign to all but kill corporate spending in local elections.

"I love the politics here," Emig said, putting aside a half-eaten slice of cold pizza in the downtown Eureka headquarters of Measure T. "In the Midwest, I felt like a voice in the wilderness."

In Humboldt County, a Connecticut-sized chunk of real estate 250 miles north of San Francisco, Emig has plenty of company in advocacy that much of the United States would consider distinctly Left Coast.

Over the last few years, the City Council in Arcata, home of Humboldt State University, has issued resolutions condemning the war in Iraq, urging President Bush's impeachment, inveighing against the failings of the U.S. electoral system and making it illegal for any city official to comply with the Patriot Act.

But the county's Measure T, on the ballot Tuesday, would carry more weight than a stern municipal harrumph. If it passes and then survives an almost inevitable legal challenge, it would bar donations to local candidates or initiatives by any out-of-town corporation.

That would cover almost all of the world's companies. As defined in the measure, a "non local" corporation is one with even a single employee, director or shareholder outside the county. However, the measure would allow labor unions with just one Humboldt County member to donate freely.

"I'd liken it to what the early abolitionists did, to the early steps in the struggle for women's suffrage, to the early stages of trade unionism," said Arcata resident David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate. "It would be the beginning of a populist progressive revolution at the ballot box."

Similarly impassioned rhetoric has been uncorked by the opposition.

It's "a grenade in the face of democracy," said Robert Zigler, an attorney who heads the Fortuna Chamber of Commerce. "It's one of the scariest things I've ever seen happen to the democratic process."

If Measure T is an assault on corporations, it's one that appears to resonate in this laid-back region of loggers, pot growers, artists, academics and just plain folks. It qualified for the ballot with nearly 6,700 signatures, just shy of what is believed to be the record set by a failed 2004 ban on genetically modified crops, according to county officials.