The Capital Alert reports that the campaign by California Forward to qualify a package of budget reform proposals for the November ballot is in need of a great amount of funding that is unlikely to materialize, so the reform movement will probably be forced to suspend the campaign if several hundred thousand dollars are not supplied very soon. Much like the Repair California campaign (which aimed to qualify a constitutional convention ballot measure) that also deflated due to a lack of funding, California Forward was looking to make big changes to reforming California’s governance through proposals that would have lowered the vote requirement for passing a budget from two-thirds to a majority vote. The campaign so far has collected no signatures and has only raised a little over $100,000.

Co-Chair of the campaign, Robert Hertzberg, told Capital Alert, “We're basically in the final throes of trying to get enough money to be able to put one or two of our measures on the ballot and collect signatures in this next week. If we get enough money, we'll go forward. We don't want to go out and spend money to get signatures unless we get enough money to actually qualify a measure."

Brian Leubitz at Calitics writes that the failure of both of these two reform campaigns is a sobering reflection of the difficulty in qualifying reformative measures: “Seeing it die the same death as Repair California's (also flawed) efforts, does leave a bad taste in one's mouth about the initiative system even if I didn't like the measure itself.  It leaves our governance up to a few rich people. We desperately need to end the supermajority requirements, but it's becoming painfully clear that we need to do far more than that. We need big ideas on how to reform government, completely unrestricted. We need a convention that can take up any idea, is built upon thousands of democratically elected representatives. Give them a month, and they'll figure something out.”

While efforts through the initiative process may lead to a dead end, such campaigns can always continue to push legislators to adopt reforms.