Opponents of Mall Expansion Sue Over Tossed Signatures

Opponents of a plan to expand Buenaventura Mall have filed a lawsuit alleging that city and county officials violated state guidelines by throwing out close to half the signatures gathered in support of a referendum.

Today, attorneys representing the referendum backers will ask a Superior Court judge to force elections officials to go back and count the disqualified signatures for the ballot measure challenging the mall expansion.

“We are asking for an order requiring them to give us credit for those,” said attorney Ronald B. Turovsky, who is representing the group that organized the referendum drive.

But city officials say they were abiding by election law when they instructed county election officials to set aside any signatures collected by petitioners who are not registered to vote in the city.

“We have appellate court cases that indicate that the procedure we used is the appropriate procedure,” City Atty. Pete Bulens said.

The election code says petition circulators must be registered voters in the city in which they are collecting signatures. But the law does not address what to do with signatures collected improperly, and courts have failed to clarify this vague legal question.

“The city’s apparent position is that you don’t count those signatures,” Turovsky said. “We do not by any means feel that the elections code mandates what they have done.”

Two weeks ago, County Clerk Richard D. Dean invalidated 45% of the signatures submitted by the referendum backers, who have spent the last six months trying to halt the $50-million mall improvement project.

The referendum would force the City Council to rescind its approval of the mall expansion or hold a special election asking voters to settle the debate. An earlier ballot measure, asking voters to prohibit the tax rebate plan to pay for the project, was resoundingly rejected in March.

Referendum organizers turned in 8,719 signatures challenging the mall’s tax-sharing arrangement. They needed 5,999 to qualify the measure for a special election, but only 4,795 were deemed valid.

In a random sampling of 500 signatures, the county clerk found that 225 were not valid. But referendum supporters say the numbers were skewed by the fact that petitions collected by unregistered voters were not counted.

Although the county elections division does not usually check whether petition circulators are registered voters, City Clerk Barbara J. Kam specifically asked elections officials to do so.

“It is a policy of the secretary of state not to disqualify the voters based on qualifications of the circulators,” Dean said. “I think the idea is that the voter, their will, should not be frustrated based on lack of qualification of the circulator.”

It is that reasoning that is the basis of the lawsuit, referendum organizers said. In part, they are leaning on a 1980 legal opinion by former secretary of state legal counsel, which found certain circulator flaws do not invalidate otherwise valid signatures.

“What is important to us is that the citizens be heard,” said Eric Lambert, spokesman for the group known as Citizens Against the Sales Tax Giveaway. “We would be fine if they would just count the signatures tomorrow and we’d drop the lawsuit.”

But city officials stand firm on their position. They have followed the letter of the law, they say, and are not going to back down unless a judge compels them to.

“That is just saying, ‘Well, if you just do what we say we’ll go away,’ ” Bulens said. “That is not going to happen.”

The referendum lawsuit is the fourth filed against the city of Ventura over the much-debated mall expansion. The city of Oxnard, which could lose two department stores to the Ventura mall, has filed three lawsuits challenging the project.