Seal Beach : Preservation Group to Circulate New Petitions

A group of residents said Monday that it will begin a new petition drive after last week’s rejection by a Superior Court judge of all signatures on petitions to force a citywide vote on limiting growth in open-space areas.

“We’re just going to start gathering signatures all over again,” said Bruce M. Stark, a founding member of the Seal Beach Preservation Group, also known as Spring.

The ruling by Judge Harmon G. Scoville upheld the city’s decision to reject any signatures collected by Spring members before Dec. 4, City Clerk Joanne M. Yeo said.

The city argued successfully that the signatures, numbering about 2,000, were invalid because of a series of errors, including publication of notice of intent to circulate the petition on Aug. 28 in the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise instead of the local Seal Beach paper and failure to obtain certification for a second publication of notice. A third publication of notice on Nov. 13 met the legal requirements, but signatures, under law, could not be obtained until 21 days after publication, or Dec. 4.

Stark said Monday that the group will not appeal Scoville’s Dec. 3 ruling. Instead, it will try once more to gather enough signatures to qualify the proposed slow-growth measure for a citywide ballot.

Part of the proposed initiative would forbid development of the Mary E. Zoeter school site in Seal Beach, which is owned by the Los Alamitos Unified School District. The land instead would be zoned “parkland in perpetuity.”

Stark said the court’s decision may have been a catalyst for the group.

“I think it’s helped us more than it hurt us,” he said. “Since the word got out (about the court’s decision), about a dozen new people have stopped by wanting to get petitions and circulate them.”