FOR ONE OF THE MOST under-the-radar ballot questions of the nine slated to go before voters this fall, the case is pretty simple.

A coalition of environmental groups is asking voters to greenlight the innocuous task of setting aside tax revenues that are already collected from the sale of sporting goods and steer them toward conservation.

Advocates are confident the question can win in November — who in the Bay State is really going to vote against nature, they wonder? — though how much additional money it may ultimately yield for conservation in the coming years is unknown, even if it passes.

The issue was framed with urgency at a campaign launch event at the Esplanade along the Charles River in Boston on Tuesday, surrounded by boaters on the water and bikers on the trails.

“This matters more than anything I can think of right now in this moment,” Katie Theoharides, president and CEO of The Trustees who served as energy and environmental affairs secretary under former Gov. Charlie Baker, said at the rally.

While leaders of the ballot campaign seem confident that it will enjoy broad support from voters, they have relied on just a handful of very deep-pocketed individuals to get the measure in front of voters in the first place, giving critics a fresh example of the ability of wealthy donors to shape the ballot question process.

In fact, it’s powered in large part by one person.

Kirsten Waerstad, a Belmont resident who appears to have very little else in the way of political giving, dropped a $800,000 donation to the campaign in September — the third-largest contribution this cycle from an individual donor who isn’t themselves running for office. Waerstad’s donation to this one ballot question is equal to how much money GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Shortsleeve donated to his own campaign in 2025, according to OCPF data.

Waerstad, who runs a philanthropic nonprofit called the Humani Foundation and is married to Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of multibillion-dollar Cambridge-based tech firm HubSpot, declined an interview request about her donation but said in a statement that she is “incredibly excited” to be supporting the campaign.

“I’m inspired by the incredible coalition of conservation organizations and community groups that are working together to pass the Protect Water and Nature initiative this fall, and I’m thrilled to help put nature on the ballot and win in November,” said Waerstad, who received Mass Audubon’s “Nature of Massachusetts” award — the group’s top honor — late last year. “The proposed Nature for All fund will help preserve priceless natural resources for our children, grandchildren, and generations of Massachusetts families to come.”

Along with Waerstad, two other individuals are financing the ballot measure, forming a trio of donors that combined have contributed all of the almost $1.4 million reported by the campaign through the Office of Campaign and Political Finance at the end of last year, not counting in-kind donations.

Natasha Grigg, a retired conservationist in Boxford, contributed $420,000. Grigg has only donated to candidates a handful of other times and not since 2021.

And the campaign reported a $160,000 haul from Jessie Panek, a retired landscape designer who lives in Harvard, on the same September day that Waerstad opened up her checkbook. It appears to be Panek’s first foray into political giving in state politics.

The campaign didn’t make Panek or Grigg available for comment. There are no limits to campaign contributions for ballot questions in Massachusetts.

And the ballot question is getting a new corporate boost: David O’Neill, Mass Audubon’s president and CEO, said at the Boston rally that Massachusetts-based company Bemis, an adhesives manufacturer based in Shirley, has pledged $100,000 to the campaign.

Sam Anderson, senior director of government affairs at Mass Audubon, defended the campaign’s fundraising strategy to date while suggesting the next required financial disclosure, in September, “is going to look a lot different” with “more diverse sets of funding.”

“These are not mega corporations,” Anderson said in an interview. “These are not out-of-state people. These are not shady interests. These are members of our community,” he said of the campaign’s donors.

If nothing else, it’s one sign that environmental causes can still churn out big-dollar supporters in Massachusetts during a political moment in which even some Democrats in and out of the Bay State speak more of affordability and “all-of-the-above” energy sources than the perils of climate change and the need to swiftly sever fossil fuels from our power mix.

Yet as the campaign shifts from ballot-qualifying to general election mode, what the end result will be of all the money raised and spent, all the signatures collected and ads likely to come, and all the potential friction introduced with Beacon Hill — even if the question passes this fall — is for now unclear.

That’s because the ballot question lacks teeth: It could wind up completely ignored even if passed by voters. State legislators, who have the last word over spending decisions, would still need to appropriate the sporting goods sales tax revenues in line with the goals laid out in the ballot measure.

If a majority of voters approve, the coalition projects that the ballot question would direct an estimated $100 million collected from the sales tax of sporting goods purchases annually to a separate fund that would support purchasing land for conservation, improving and adding trails, and bolstering resilience against extreme weather events. Georgia, Texas, and Virginia have already adopted similar models for conservation funding.

The groups leading the effort, including Mass Audubon, the Trustees, and The Nature Conservancy, say they feel they have no choice but to put the issue directly in front of voters.

Gov. Maura Healey’s fiscal year 2027 budget cuts the Department of Conservation and Recreation by nearly 4 percent amid broader fiscal headwinds and a continued maintenance backlog the agency was only starting to dig out of. Healey herself, however, has now endorsed the ballot question, telling GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” on Wednesday that it’s a “good thing in Massachusetts to be supporting” a measure that funds nature and water protection and park and trail restoration without raising taxes.

And while state environmental officials project Massachusetts is on track to meet its goal of conserving 30 percent of state land by 2030, the coalition of more than 90 groups backing the ballot campaign, known as Nature for Massachusetts, argues it will take more money to get there than the state is allocating — and there’s no better way to fund that push than without raising or creating new taxes.

Funding for nature, said Brad Campbell, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation, is consistently “the last funded and the first cut in the budget scrum that happens every year in the Legislature. It’s time to send a clear message to the Legislature that this is important.”

Regardless, it’s not clear the ballot question would dedicate as much money to conservation as the $100 million that advocates claim.

A review by the Tufts University Center for State Policy center estimates the measure would only direct about $65 million into the new nature conservation fund if passed because some of the sales tax revenue counted in other estimates is actually already earmarked for schools and transportation. That’s compared to the roughly $400 million the state spends annually on conservation and recreation, the Tufts analysis found.

And it’s raised some concerns about the prospect for budgeting via ballot: If advocates of one issue are able to gain voter approval for siphoning off a chunk of General Fund revenues to support their cause, it’s not hard to see how such a method could be abused, further squeezing Beacon Hill’s budgeting powers to set its priorities and fund state programs accordingly.

There’s some limited precedent for this, including a 1992 ballot question that levied a new tax on cigarettes and directed that money to fund public health programs and more recently the “millionaires tax” that passed in 2022 and is aimed specifically at transportation and public education initiatives.

But in those cases, new sources of revenue were added into the mix, instead of a tax already in existence that would be drawn from the General Fund.

“From a public finance standpoint, carving up existing revenue sources into dedicated streams for specific things is a dangerous road,” said Doug Howgate, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. “These are proposals made in a vacuum. The reality is, by definition, spending $1 in one place and not another place has a tradeoff. As folks are assessing this proposal, they’re not going to see those tradeoffs.”

Then again, how much the ballot question if passed would even upend the normal budget process for conservation spending isn’t clear.

Legislators could fulfill the proponents’ desire for the tax revenue from sporting goods purchases to act as additional money on top of what is already spent on open spaces, parks, water protection, and coastal resilience projects.

Or they could subsequently just reduce what is currently dedicated for those purposes so that the new dedicated revenue stream balances out the net total funding for nature, especially as the State House looks poised to pass an environmental bond bill to the tune of more than $3 billion – effectively negating the impact of the ballot question. Either way, passage of the measure in no way guarantees a funding outcome as lawmakers hash out a budget year after year.

Though lawmakers may feel political pressure not to ignore the earmark after a majority of voters express a clear desire to see the money spent a certain way, some on Beacon Hill are openly wondering how, exactly, the measure would change the budget process from the status quo — raising questions about what this campaign is practically going to do.

Rep. Alice Peisch, a Democrat who serves as co-chair for the Joint Committee on Initiative Petitions, made that point at a hearing over the ballot question in March.

“And hope that we appropriate, is that the idea?” she asked the ballot proponents about the thinking behind the effort. “Seems like a lot of effort to do something that at the end of the day is no different from the process we have right now, which is that you all, and many others, would advocate with the Legislature during the budget process.”

Theoharides, though, said majority support from voters this fall would still go a long way under the Golden Dome.

“Nothing is ironclad,” she conceded in an interview, “but this would show that the will of the voters is to direct this money in this way.”

Advocates insist they are keeping their eyes wide open.

Part of the decision to go to the ballot in the first place, Anderson said, was a “diagnosis” that this issue “wasn’t going to rise to the top” for lawmakers this session.

“Of course there’s risks, and we thought very hard about those risks,” he said. “There are other important issues that we need to continue to advocate on with the Legislature. There’s reputational risk — the risk of losing. The best we can do is just be for what we’re for.”