Probe Launched Over Damage to Petition Booklet : Investigation: Group seeking referendum on Civic Center redevelopment charges that Councilman Ken Genser interfered with gathering of signatures. He says tearing of document was an accident.

Santa Monica police are investigating a complaint that City Councilman Ken Genser interfered with efforts to circulate a petition seeking signatures to put on the ballot a referendum on the Civic Center redevelopment plan.

Police have been unable to determine if any law has been violated.

The investigation was sparked by a complaint from Joel Mark Weinstein, a Santa Monica resident, who was gathering signatures Friday night at Pavilion’s market on Montana Avenue. Weinstein was approached by Genser, who opposes a ballot measure.

According to Weinstein’s account in a police report, Genser asked to see the petition, but refused to return it several minutes later. Weinstein alleges that during that time, Genser was not reading or signing the petition, but was merely holding it while trying to persuade several people near the petition table not to sign it.

Weinstein told police he tried to grab his petition back from Genser, but to no avail. When he finally got the petition booklet back, he said it was torn away from its loose-leaf binding and bent.

Santa Monica Police Sgt. Gary Gallinot said police are planning to interview Weinstein again to determine if an Election Code violation occurred.

But even if no election law has been broken, the damaged petition may present another problem. Santa Monica City Clerk Clarice Dykhouse said petitions must be intact, to ensure that a voter has been given the needed information before signing.

Though only about 30 signatures are at issue, she said, members of the group that favors a ballot measure for revamping the Civic Center, Citizens for a Better Civic Center, have moved quickly to protect those signatures by asking Genser to sign an affidavit saying the incident at Pavilion’s was an accident.

Genser did not return phone calls from The Times seeking comment. But he told the Santa Monica Outlook that the pages of the petition booklet came apart accidentally while he was perusing them.

A statement from the citizens group was a tad skeptical on that point.

“The ‘disassembling’ of a petition booklet is a very serious matter, whether by accident or otherwise, as it may invalidate voter signatures,” said John Bodin, a leader of the citizens group. Noting that the booklets are carefully bound, Bodin said, “We have been circulating hundreds of petition booklets for several weeks, in rain and shine, all handled by thousands of voters. Except for this incident, we have yet to have one of them ‘fall apart.’ ”

The Civic Center Plan was passed unanimously last month by the City Council after several years of study and public review. The complex zoning plan to revamp the area calls for replacing surface parking lots with parks and allowing the RAND Corp. to expand and develop its boarded-up property on Ocean Avenue. The plan also includes space for a modern police facility, 350 housing units and a six-level parking structure, all of which must face further council scrutiny before they could be built.

The environmental impact study of the plan forecast that new traffic generated by the changes to the Civic Center area will be ameliorated by a change in traffic patterns and other street improvements. But opponents of the plan dispute this finding, arguing that the result will be gridlock.

For these and other reasons, they launched the petition drive to give Santa Monica voters a chance to derail the plan.

Bodin said that the signature-gathering effort is on target and that he expects the referendum to qualify for the ballot. The signatures of 5,466 registered voters are needed for it to qualify.

The City Council, meeting in closed session Tuesday night, agreed to extend the deadline for turning in those signatures to Monday. The deadline had been today.

The extension was granted on two grounds: First, the council vote on the Civic Center measure came after midnight, hence, opponents were shortchanged in the original calculation of their deadline. Second, extending the deadline one day meant petitions would have been due in the City Clerk’s office on Christmas Eve, a legal holiday.

Now the petitions are due at 5:30 p.m. Monday.