Members of the Long Beach Citizens’ and Patients’ Rights PAC just prior to submitting their 43,000+ signatures in February.

In February the Long Beach Citizens’ and Patients Rights’ PAC (LBCPR) submitted over 43,000 signatures in an attempt to force a special election on the question of whether medpot dispensaries should be allowed to operate in Long Beach. But last month the City informed LBCPR that the organization failed to obtain the requisite number of valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

But LBCPR says that, one way or another, the group’s “Initiative Regulation of Medical Marijuana Collectives”—which proposes to allow dispensaries to operate in Long Beach, with a 4% sales tax remitted to the City—must be allowed to come to a vote, or the City will face yet another lawsuit in its ongoing effort to keep dispensaries out of Long Beach.

“There’s no question that we will qualify for the ballot,” Gautam Dutta, LBCPR’s election lawyer, tells the Long Beach Post. “What the city clerk said is that, based on his preliminary analysis, we fell a few signatures short of qualifying for a special election. However, some valid signatures were not counted. But even in a worst-case scenario, we have way more than enough signatures to qualify for next April’s regular city election.”

To force a special election, LBCPR needed to submit petition signatures from 15% of Long Beach’s registered voters, while the threshold for getting on the ballot for a general election is 10%. According to City Clerk Larry Herrera, based on a random sampling of 3% of the total number of signatures submitted (the standard procedure for signature verification), LBCPR submitted valid signatures from roughly 14.2% of the city’s electorate.

In an April 18 letter to the City, Dutta expressed LBCPR’s disappointment that Herrera has declined the group’s request that he review the full petition, rather than the small sampling, since not only is the petition so close to fulfilling the 15% requirement, but some of the sampling signatures that Herrera rejected are, in fact, valid.

“[W]e are disappointed that the City Clerk has declined to review all 43,159 voter signatures, because he claims that our Petition fell 18 signatures short of the 957 signatures required to qualify for a full signature evaluation,” Dutta writes. “However, the City Clerk’s claim does not withstand careful analysis. In fact, 14 of those signatures were not counted for an improper reason: after signing our Petition, those 14 voters had moved to a different address. Furthermore, an additional 4 signatures were not counted due to erroneous voter-database records. Because our Petition satisfies the requirements for a full signature evaluation, the City must review all 43,159 voter signatures that were submitted […].”

But LBCPR offers to forgo the question of forcing a special election if the City will immediately agree to place the initiative on the April 2014 general-election ballot—a compromise the City has apparently rejected thus far in discussions between the two sides.

“[W]e are disappointed that you have rejected our proactive effort to save Long Beach taxpayers nearly $1.5 million dollars [i.e., the approximate cost of a special election] by declining to place our proposed initiative on the City’s April 8, 2014 Primary Nominating Election,” the letter says. “By law, if a proposed initiative has been signed by at least 10 percent of registered voters, a city must either (a) enact that initiative into law, or (b) place that initiative on the ballot no later than the next regular municipal election. Here, it is beyond question that our Petition was signed by at least 10 percent of Long Beach voters.”

The question of the initiative’s qualifying for the general election apparently hinges on whether the signatures gathered by LBCPR can be used for that purpose despite the petition’s asking “[w]hether a ballot measure [shall] be submitted to voters of the City of Long Beach at a special municipal election” (emphasis added). Herrera’s official response to the group stated only that “the initiative petition is insufficient,” with no mention of specific elections. Regarding the question of whether the petition qualifies for the general election, Herrera referred the Post to City Attorney Robert Shannon’s office. The City Attorney’s Office declined to respond to the Post‘s inquiry, but Dutta reports that deputy city attorneys have indicated to LBCPR that the submitted signatures do not pertain to qualifying for the general election.

Dutta strongly disagrees, citing California Elections Code Sec. 9215, which states, “If [an] initiative petition is signed by not less than 10 percent of the voters of the city […] the legislative body shall [… a]dopt the ordinance, without alteration, […s]ubmit the ordinance, without alteration, to the voters [… or o]rder a report pursuant to Section 9212 at the regular meeting at which the certification of the petition is presented, [and then] either adopt the ordinance within 10 days or order an election pursuant to subdivision.”

Medpot dispensaries have been completely banned in Long Beach since August 2012. However, because the ban does not apparently reflect the will of residents—for example, in 2010 53% of Long Beach voters cast their ballots in favor of legalizing marijuana for even recreational use—it seems unlikely residents would fail to overturn the City’s ban, if given the opportunity to do so.

In their letter, LBCPR gives the City until April 24 to resolve the matter to the group’s satisfaction; otherwise, “we will have no choice but to (1) ask a court to vindicate the rights of all Long Beach voters, and (2) seek all reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.”

The letter closes with an appeal to let the residents of Long Beach resolve the issue: “We hope that the City will let the voters decide whether to regulate and tax medical marijuana.”