FULLERTON : Ballot Argument Ordered Rewritten

A residents’ group won a legal victory Thursday when a Superior Court commissioner agreed that Fullerton’s city attorney wrote a flawed summary of the group’s proposed ballot measure aimed at halting the widening of roads.

City Atty. R.K. (Kerry) Fox must rewrite the summary and remove wording that seems to argue against the initiative and that includes information not contained in the measure, Commissioner Ronald L. Bauer said.

The City Council will consider appealing the ruling when it meets April 3.

Bauer’s ruling provides the first victory to a group of residents calling themselves Save Our Bastanchury. The group has been fighting since last summer to stop proposed road-improvement projects in the city, which they fear will bring more traffic and noise to their neighborhoods.

“We’re very pleased with the ruling,” said Mary B. Homme, president of the group.

Homme and other group members have been struggling with the City Council to stop the widening of Bastanchury Road and Euclid Street in the city. A one-mile stretch of Bastanchury behind Homme’s house is scheduled to be widened in 1991 from four lanes to six. Improvements to a portion of Euclid is slated for later this year.

At issue Thursday was a four-paragraph summary Fox wrote of the group’s ballot measure. The measure, which needs about 6,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, would halt nearly any city road improvement that would cause traffic noise to rise above limits set out in the city’s general plan.

Traffic on several stretches of Bastanchury and most other large streets in Fullerton already exceeds that level, city officials have said.

Fox’s summary, which must appear at the top of petitions circulated to qualify the measure for the ballot, concludes that “the practical effect of the initiative would be to prevent the city from improving traffic circulation and safety on a number of existing arterial streets and highways.”

Straying from summarizing the measure and delving into its possible effects is not Fox’s responsibility, Bauer said.

“I don’t think that’s a summary of the petition,” he said. “It’s an argument.”

Fox’s summary probably “would cause a lot of people to vote against this initiative when they learn this information,” he said. “But they shouldn’t learn it here.”