Protest petitions and citizen initiative petitions: Greenboro council to Guilford delegation

The Greensboro City Council votes Tuesday on its legislative agenda. Notably missing from the list is any request for the restoration of the protest petition. That may be because the groundswell of support for reform caught the council off guard. And by all accounts, the Guilford delegation is already committed to overturning Greensboro's exemption, so the council's opinion probably doesn't count. For more information on the protest petition, read this.

Not that city government is indifferent to matters of land development and political influence. The memo created by Acting City Attorney Becky Jo Peterson-Buie for council members pledges that staff "will closely monitor" any amendments to ethics and lobbying laws. "It is expected that the proposed amendments will apply the concepts of the new [state] ethics and lobbying law to local government officials."

Rep. Pricey Harrison, the same Democratic legislator who has promised to introduce legislation to restore the protest petition, has indicated she will sponsor a bill to extend to local officials the same ethics rules passed for state legislators in 2006.

“I have seen members of these governing boards vote on issues that they would have had to recuse themselves from if bound by the same laws,” she told me last month. “[The Heart of the Triad proposal] seems to be a prime example, conceived of by and for development interests with very little citizen input.”

Speaking of the swath of rural land between the Triad's three major cities, the legislative agenda contains an item backing funding support to "enable the success of the Heart of the Triad... to create a mixed-used development area that maximizes job creation and preserves the natural area."

Two other items on the legislative agenda are noteworthy.

Anti-gang legislation: "The city will support legislation which includes the suppression, intervention and prevention of criminal street gangs and which provides new tools and funding for the same." The memo does not specify whether the city supports enhanced sentencing for youth offenders. Last summer, former Mayor Keith Holliday came out in favor of such legislation, which stalled in the NC Senate Appropriations Committee co-chaired by US Senate candidate Kay Hagan.

And following a fraught running debate over a proposed citywide minimum wage hike, the legal department met with the Greensboro Minimum Wage Committee to discuss the citizen initiative provision in the city ordinance. Out of that comes this resolution in the council's request to state lawmakers: "The city will support a change in the city's voter count requirements with respect to initiatives, referenda and recalls, and support a change requiring public hearings on initiative and referenda issues."

Exactly what change in the city's voter count requirements is proposed is unclear. As someone who is sympathetic to the cause of raising the city's minimum wage, I can't imagine how the current ordinance requiring that a petition's signatures equal 25 percent of the municipal turnout in the last election could be much clearer. And what does it mean to "support a change requiring public hearings on initiative and referenda issues"? Hearings for any petition no matter how many signatures have been gathered? If not, then how many signatures? And that gets us back to the same old question about sufficiency.