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KAYSVILLE — Residents' bid to bring "common sense" to City Hall may have been quashed by their failure to follow directions.
Davis County elections officials disqualified several packets of signatures collected by a group of Kaysville residents hoping to change how they're represented in City Hall and to lower their power bills.
The disqualifications left the group well short of the 1,400-plus signatures needed to get each of the three proposed initiatives on the ballot in November.
Residents say the fight isn't over, though.
"We may have no choice but to take this to district court," said Richard Lenz, co-founder of Kaysville Citizens for Responsible Government.
Lenz said the disqualifications essentially claim that residents were "lacking in the judiciousness in our process of getting the petitions put together, or that we are outright liars who committed fraud."
County elections officials say several packets of signatures showed signs of being unstapled and then stapled again, an action they say violates instructions from the Utah Lieutenant Governor's Office.
"As soon as we received the petition packets, we noticed immediately that some of the staples had been removed and replaced," said Steve Rawlings, Davis County clerk/auditor. "That's a no-no. Once those are bound together, you leave them together."
In addition, the signatures required of petition volunteers to indicate they witnessed all signatures collected were found on blank sheets, creating doubt as to whether that volunteer actually witnessed the signings.
"It does … create a question as to the practice of the person who is listed as verifying the signatures on the blank page," William McGuire, chief deputy in the Davis County Attorney's Office, wrote in a letter supporting the disqualifications. "Did that person follow the practice of verifying the sheet prior to anyone signing it? And if so, did he really witness the signing of those he otherwise verified?"
Those questions are "essential to the validity of those verifications," McGuire wrote, making it "appropriate to rule that any signatures validated by that individual could not be certified."
Lenz said the disqualifications essentially claim that residents were "lacking in the judiciousness in our process of getting the petitions put together, or that we are outright liars who committed fraud."
Neither of those things are true, he said.
"The interesting part about it is that it wasn't that we didn't have enough signatures," Lenz said. "They came up with what I consider a very poor decision, making an interpretation of the law as they see it. We're going to challenge it."
Lenz says petitions were restapled because they had fallen apart during the petition-gathering process. He also said volunteers who signed the blank pages certifying signatures didn't break any laws.
"I can't find anything that says we can't verify an empty page," Lenz said.
Whether the volunteer signed the page before or after signatures were collected doesn't matter, he said, as long as he or she witnessed the signatures.
Kaysville Mayor Steve Hiatt said he was surprised to learn that county officials had determined the group failed to follow proper procedure during the initiative process.
"As a city, we certainly support the democratic process of putting forth citizens' initiatives so long as the process is appropriately followed," Hiatt said. "It appears, based on the judgement of the county attorney, it wasn't appropriately followed."
The so-called "Kaysville Common Sense Initiatives" sought to change the city's form of government, create district representation on the City Council and mandate that revenue generated by the city-owned power company be restricted to power company operations.
To bring the respective issues to a vote, Kaysville Citizens for Responsible Government was required by state law to collect 1,431 signatures per issue — or 10 percent of city voters who cast ballots in the most recent presidential election.
After some of the petition packets were disqualified for failure to follow proper procedure, valid signatures for the respective initiatives ranged between 949 and 1,074.
Email:jpage@ksl.com
