Huntington Beach City Council v. Superior Court

I. Introduction

This proceeding involves writ petitions from both sides over a city ballot proposition. At the outset we stress that nothing we say in this opinion is intended to comment on the merits of the proposition. Anything that even sounds like we are commenting on the merits has been necessitated because the trial court struck out certain statements from a voters’ pamphlet argument because they were supposedly “irrelevant,” and there is no way one can analyze whether statements are relevant to a measure without some articulation of the probable nexus between the two.

A. The City’s Petition

The first writ petition we consider is the city’s challenges to the trial court’s exclusions of a group of statements held to be irrelevant to the ballot measure. The measure is a proposition aimed at increasing taxes paid by Huntington Beach’s one electricity-generating plant.

The statute that governs the content of voter pamphlet arguments, Elections Code section 9295, does not mention relevancy as among the limited bases on which a trial court has authority to strike a statement. Rather, the statute only—and that is the word used in the statute—allows a trial court to…