Water Initiative Petitions Begin Circulating Next Week

November 5, 2021

Californians who want more water:

On November 1st the Attorney General of California released the title and summary for the Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022. This means that our campaign has until the end of April 2022 to gather 1.5 million signatures on our initiative petitions.

As soon as title and summary was received, our printer formatted the final version of the petition, our attorney checked every word to ensure compliance, and we started the press. Unfortunately, you can’t print this nearly 8,000 word petition at home. Specialty 25.5″ x 14″ paper (to be folded twice to have an 8.5″ x 14″ footprint) was pre-ordered and on Tuesday 11/09 the first 100,000 petitions will be on a truck on its way to our staging areas.

Our campaign intends to rely on a combination of volunteer signature gathering, direct mail, and paid signature gathering to reach the ultimate objective, 997,179 verified signatures from registered California voters. Each of these methods has unique strengths:

  • Unlike in past decades, volunteers these days can use technology to mobilize and coordinate logistics to deliver hundreds of thousands of signatures.
  • Paid signature gathering can guarantee results, but is most cost-effective early in the 180 day period before too many other initiative campaigns are competing for circulators.
  • Direct mail can be employed to great effect at any point in the campaign up until the final six weeks, and at whatever scale is needed to deliver the required results.

To-date, mostly through small donations from hundreds of Californians that want more water, we have been able to pay for polling research from one of the best firms in the business, to pay for our first delivery of petitions, and begin to save for the major expenses of paid signature gathering and direct mail. All of the volunteers running this campaign – and all of us are volunteers – are grateful for the grassroots momentum that continues to build.

Momentum is also building with media coverage. Just this past week there was a guest commentary promoting the initiative in Cal Matters, an editorial dedicated to the initiative in the Orange County Register, and coverage of the initiative being cleared for signature gathering by Politico. We are also quietly collecting endorsements from water agencies, businesses, cities, and counties.

Next week our volunteer signature gathering campaign will begin. We have already received inquiries from hundreds of people who wish to circulate petitions for signatures. By the end of next week we will have locations throughout the state where petitions will be available and these locations will be posted on our website.

Already on our campaign website, under the “Volunteer” navigation bar icon, anyone can find instructions on how to circulate and fill out petitions. Volunteers can sign up to circulate water initiative petitions, or make petitions available at their business. You can also download a sign to post at your business to let customers know that petitions are available. Other resources are being added every day to ensure volunteers have all the information they need to effectively gather signatures for more water!

Anyone interested in helping can also send an email to volunteer@morewaternow.com. And, of course, we must ask supporters to please consider donating to our campaign. We have already attracted more grassroots donations than any water initiative in California history. Let’s set new records and send a message to everyone, big and small, still on the sidelines. Join our movement to end water scarcity in California forever.