Direct Legislation Effort Update: Not Enough Valid Signatures

In April, I wrote about the effort by some local residents to use the direct legislation process to enact an ordinance requiring that all city capital projects costing more than $1 million be put before voters in a binding referendum.

To make this happen – and either compel the South Milwaukee City Council to pass the ordinance or at least call a referendum on the referendum requirement – the group needed 1,197 valid signatures, or 15% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

Well, the group turned in its signatures recently, and there aren’t enough.

That’s according to this letter sent from the city to Jim Leavens, one of the leaders of the direct legislation campaign.

The letter notes that the city found there were only 1,172 signatures submitted.

And not all of those signatures were deemed valid, either because they fell outside of the 60-day window necessary to obtain them, were missing key information, or other factors – including 17 sheets that were signed and dated by the signature collector before the dates accompanying the signatures themselves.

The group has 10 days to fix some of the “deficiencies,” and if 1,197 valid signatures are not presented within that timeframe, the city clerk will not forward the petition to the City Council.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens … and I reiterate my stance against the proposed city “spending cap.” You can see my argument in my previous post, but it boils down to this: The City Council is elected to make decisions like this, and putting major spending like this to a vote not only is unwieldy, costly and chilling to the prospects of necessary projects, it goes against the whole idea of representative government.

City leaders are up for election every two years. That’s the ultimate referendum.