Fullerton Petitions Fall 16 Signatures Short : Airport Referendum Effort Fails

Less than 10 minutes after Carl Stevenson returned Thursday from Fullerton City Hall, where he had learned that his referendum drive against a city ordinance allowing small jets at Fullerton Municipal Airport was 16 signatures short, his doorbell rang.

It was a woman returning one of the petitions that asked registered voters to support a referendum on the ordinance, which passed on a 4-1 council vote Sept. 30, allowing certain types of small jets to take off and land at the airport for the first time. The woman’s petition had 16 names on it, Stevenson said.

“She had apparently misunderstood,” he said. “She thought we had the remainder of the day to get them in so they could be turned in Friday. “She was extremely upset when she found out she missed the window of opportunity.”

Ordinance’s Restrictions

The ordinance, which went into effect Friday, permits jets weighing less than 12,500 pounds and producing less than 75 decibels of noise to use the 3,120-foot runway at the airport. Only the Cessna Citation 1 aircraft currently meets those restrictions.

“The action the council took was to place more restrictions on the airport than there were before,” said City Manager William C. Winter. “I think the complaints are going to be fewer.”

Stevenson acknowledged in an interview that even if he had the woman’s wayward petition in hand Thursday, the normal verification process--which routinely strikes between 10% and 20% of names as ineligible--would have doomed the effort.

“Part of the problem was that none of our guys had ever been involved in anything like this before,” Stevenson said. “It took a while to get ourselves organized.”

According to referendum procedure, opponents of the airport measure had 30 days from the time the ordinance was passed to collect petitions bearing the names of 10% of the city’s registered voters.

Printing Took a Week

Stevenson said it took a week to have the petitions printed in the proper form and then, earlier this week, the Orange County registrar filed an updated total of Fullerton voters with the secretary of state. The new figures raised the number from more than 56,000 to just over 58,000, thus raising the required number of signatures for the petition by 200 just days before they were due.

“I think we did quite well for the first time and the fact that we had less than three weeks,” Stevenson said, citing the low refusal rate his backers encountered when they approached Fullerton residents with the petitions. “A lot of people are concerned with noise, but a very significant number expressed serious safety concerns” about jets landing at the airport. He conceded that the effort to overturn the ordinance is probably dead.

“As far as I’m concerned, the issue is closed,” Winter said. “We were just waiting to see what happened” with the petition drive, he said, and the city had no contingency plans if the drive succeeded.

Stevenson is a write-in candidate for the City Council in Tuesday’s election, a campaign he began after the airport vote.

“I don’t think if I’m unsuccessful it will indicate that people don’t support our position,” he said. “I’m not a one-issue candidate.”