Sacramento Kings
Citizens of Sacramento, California, won’t get a vote on the city’s decision to use $258 million from taxpayers to fund the construction of a new arena for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy Frawley found the petitions forms contained too many errors, which violated state election laws.
In addition, Judge Frawley indicated he believed the proposed ballot measure would have violated the city’s charter, by inhibiting the council’s ability to manage the city’s finances.
In an expected move, one of the groups supporting an arena ballot measure says it’s planning to sue the city of Sacramento after the city clerk rejected a ballot measure for inconsistencies, according to KCRA-TV Channel 3.
The organizers of Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork are waiting to look at material from the city clerk before launching a legal challenge, according to KCRA.
On Friday, the clerk rejected the ballot measure for things such as inconsistent dates, missing language in some versions of petitions, some lacking required wording and not including the names and signatures of proponents.
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Shirley Concolino, Sacramento’s City Clerk, announced last Friday that she was disqualifying the petition filed with her office containing more than 40,000 signatures to put a proposed new arena for the Sacramento Kings to a public vote this June. The arena is to be partially funded through a taxpayer subsidy, which the group known as STOP (Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork) opposes and seeks to petition to the ballot.
ABC News 10 reports that the city clerk invalidated petitions based on various “election code violations,” though mostly technical mistakes, including a missing notice of intent on some petitions and faulty dates on others.
It appears opponents of the city of Sacramento’s subsidy to bring a new arena to downtown are a step closer to having voters decide.
The petition backed by the Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork, STOP, needed 22,000 valid signatures go get on the June ballot. According to the Sacramento County Voter Registrar’s Office, 22,498 signatures of the 34,532 submitted were validated, that’s 65.2 percent.
Concern over variations in the ballots used to collect signatures to put the downtown Sacramento arena before voters led to a pause in signature verification this week, and the count had to be restarted Friday.
“We had some sorting to do,” Jill LaVine, Sacramento County Registrar of Voters, said in describing the pause. That resulted in her office issuing no update on how many signatures had been verified of the 34,000 submitted by groups concerned about the arena plan. Earlier this week, The4000, a group opposing the ballot measure and supporting the arena, called for further scrutiny of the ballots after determining at least five different versions were used last summer and fall to collect voter signatures.
After two lawsuits failed to block a vote on a San Diego referendum over the city council’s Barrio Logan land use plan, those opposed to the referendum claimed the process was “undemocratic.”
Attorney Jan Goldsmith took issue with that in an op-ed in the local Union-Tribune newspaper. “The use of referendums to challenge legislative decisions is legal and has deep roots in democracy,” wrote Goldsmith. “There is nothing undemocratic about leaving decisions to San Diego voters, which is all a referendum does.”
Since 2011, there have been three referendums in San Diego challenging enactments by the city council and putting those ordinances before voters.
The entire effort for a ballot measure on the proposed downtown Sacramento arena has been messy, with the public left in the dark too often.
People who want a vote on the arena subsidy accuse city officials of hiding the ball on how much taxpayers would actually fork over. But they’re not doing themselves any favors by playing games with their petitions.
They should be straight with voters and release all the various petitions they submitted last month. James Cathcart, a leader of Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork, told The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board Wednesday that he doesn’t know if that will happen.
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An attorney who specializes in election law said timing, not signature validity, may prove to be the toughest obstacle to a ballot measure seeking to require public approval of any subsidies for a new downtown Sacramento arena.
Tom Hiltachk, of Bell McAndrews & Hiltachk LLP in Sacramento, said the wild card is if approvals for the arena go through in the spring, as both city and Sacramento Kings officials have said was the plan.
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Sheer math suggests the number of signatures submitted for a 2014 ballot measure on the Sacramento Kings arena may have a narrow margin to succeed.
According to the city clerk’s office Friday, there were more than 34,000 signatures in support of the measure submitted to the Sacramento County registrar’s office, along with more than 15,000 signature withdrawal forms. Typically, not all signatures submitted hold up as valid; some people who signed either won’t be registered voters, or won’t be registered in the city of Sacramento. Some duplicates or signatures that can’t be verified because of illegibility are also possible.