Friday afternoon, July 27, 2018, the City Clerk announced that the petition fell short of the required number of signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot. A total of 8,985 valid signatures were needed; however the total number of valid signatures was only 7,895 out of the 11,512 submitted therefore the City Clerk deemed the petition to put the rent control measure on the ballot as insufficient.
juna
07-28-2018, 09:40 PM
That is a huge difference! And very depressing.
How do they verify signatures for validity?
Juna
Friday afternoon, July 27, 2018, the City Clerk announced that the petition fell short of the required number of signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot. A total of 8,985 valid signatures were needed; however the total number of valid signatures was only 7,895 out of the 11,512 submitted therefore the City Clerk deemed the petition to put the rent control measure on the ballot as insufficient.
tommy
07-29-2018, 07:55 AM
Signatures must be registered voters & can be counted only once. Per the Santa Rosa website, there are 89,849 registered voters in Santa Rosa. Thus the requirement of 8,985 signatures for an initiative to appear on the ballot, is 10% of registered voters.
rossmen
07-29-2018, 09:15 PM
When the clerk gets the petition signatures they do a sampling of what percentage are valid, ie the name, address and signature match voter registration. When it's close like this petition they do further research. Looks like they checked every signature. Petitions like this, politically charged with volunteer signature gatherers, generally need at least 50% more signatures than required because of errors.
...How do they verify signatures for validity?
MikeH
07-30-2018, 10:58 PM
But the repeal of the Costa-Hawkins Act WILL be on the November ballot.
This Act limits rent control to only old apartments, built before 1995. It's repeal would mean all apartments would potentially be subject to rent control.
So if you're a proponent of rent control, you will have something to vote for.
A statewide ballot measure that would repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act — and return extreme forms of rent control to California — has qualified for the Nov. 6 ballot.
On June 15, the Secretary of State’s office confirmed that rent control proponents had submitted enough signatures to place the repeal measure before voters. Official certification of the initiative is expected on June 28.
If Costa-Hawkins is repealed, cities will be authorized to apply rent control to single-family homes and new multifamily housing. They’ll also be able to make rent caps permanent, even after changes in tenancy. This type of extreme rent control would bring construction of rental housing to a halt, exacerbating the state’s housing shortage and driving up rents from most tenants.
If passed, the measure would give city leaders new options when establishing or updating rent control policies. Longstanding rules limiting rent control to properties built before February 1995—or earlier, in many cases—would be struck from the books, giving local governments the power to place newer buildings under rent control regulations.
“The time for rent gouging by corporate landlords is coming to an end,” campaign director Damien Goodmon said in a statement.
tommy
07-31-2018, 08:29 AM
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-10-04_15-56-29.png
Effort (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8579393-181/effort-to-get-rent-control) to get rent control back on (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8579393-181/effort-to-get-rent-control)ballot (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8579393-181/effort-to-get-rent-control) in Santa Rosa effort falls short
(https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8579393-181/effort-to-get-rent-control)
KEVIN MCCALLUM (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/staff-directory?person=26)
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | July 30, 2018,
Here’s why Sonoma County elections officials invalidated 3,617 of the signatures on petitions seeking rent control in Santa Rosa:
1,220 were not registered to vote
977 were registered at a different address
811 were registered outside Santa Rosa
421 signed more than once
55 signatures didn’t match
46 didn’t give an address
30 belonged to voters who were not registered at the time of signing
29 could not be identified
13 signed before the petitions officially began circulating
8 contained no signature at all
7 printed instead of signed their names
Housing advocates failed to gather enough signatures to put rent control back before Santa Rosa voters this fall.
“We’re sorry to report that our signature drive has come up short,” read a message posted Sunday by the North Bay Organizing Project, which was behind the effort.
When it submitted its petition to the Santa Rosa Clerk in late June, the group appeared to have gathered more than enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 6 ballot.
The group needed 10 percent of the city’s 89,849 registered voters, or 8,985 people, to sign a valid petition to qualify. It appeared to submit 11,565 signatures, 22 percent more than needed, according to Santa Rosa City Clerk Daisy Gomez.
But the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters put the raw total at 11,512 and then rejected many of the signatures, determining they were from people who were not registered to vote in Santa Rosa.“Too many signatures came back as unregistered voters, though we know that people’s intentions were good,” the North Bay Organizing Project wrote in a message on Facebook.
The petition sought to cap rent increases in apartments built before 1995, prohibiting them from rising more than the consumer price index. It also sought to apply just-cause eviction rules to all residential housing in the city. Duplexes owned by landlords who lived in the city would have been exempt.
“We were really focused on corporate landlords who live across the country and the world,” said Davin Cardenas, lead organizer with the group.
While the loss was “tough,” Cardenas said the volunteer effort was “beautiful.”
“We actually gathered a lot of signatures in a very short period of time,” Cardenas said.
Continues here (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8579393-181/effort-to-get-rent-control)