Petition Rejection Raises Questions

By Bryce Haugen
Contributing Writer

For opponents of Moorhead’s new drug paraphernalia ordinance, the clock is ticking.

Following a city clerk recommendation, council members unanimously rejected a petition Monday night that would have let voters decide the fate of a month-old ban on sales of glass pipes and other items police and prosecutors consider to be designed for using drugs. Despite the petition’s more than 2,900 signatures, the city clerk found only 1,118 to be valid. That’s far short of the necessary 1,847 signatures – 10 percent of the city’s 2008 presidential voters – to trigger a referendum.

The five-member petition sponsoring committee has a 30-day window that started Tuesday to file “corrected signature papers” and “otherwise correct the petition,” according to the city charter.Smoke shop owner Tom Tepley, a sponsoring committee member, said he planned to meet with organizers and lawyers Wednesday to decide how to proceed.At the Monday meeting, City Attorney John Shockley told the council he would not comment on what kind of revisions would be allowed because he didn’t want to advise the petition organizers.

As far as how to interpret the charter: “That would be up to the sponsoring committee to determine that,” Shockley said. The petition verification process was “very detailed and prescriptive,” city clerk Jill Wenger said. Five city staff members and eight police volunteers spent 191 total hours over six days in late January reviewing the thick stack of paper. They worked in teams, kicking out petitioners whose names were deemed illegible (336), wrote improper addresses or didn’t live in Moorhead (98), didn’t provide signatures (102), were challenged for a variety of reasons including felonies (70) and signed more than once (17).

But the 1,174 names from people who weren’t listed as registered voters in the state’s database easily comprised the largest category of rejected signatures. At the meeting, council member Mark Altenburg asked Wenger whether she was certain all the new registrations petition organizers collected were in the system before the review process began. Wenger said the list was up to date – a point Deputy Clay County Auditor Shannon Morin, who enters voter registrations into the state system, confirmed Tuesday. In December and January, the auditor’s office changed and added 1,022 registrations and Morin estimated 98 percent were due to the petition drive.

Altenburg said he was disappointed more signers – a large chunk from his ward, which includes Minnesota State University Moorhead – didn’t register since many of them are apprehensive about civic involvement.“It may have discouraged people from participating in the democratic process in the future,” he told the council. On behalf of concerned constituents, Altenburg also questioned the use of police volunteers to review signatures since the police department helped craft the ordinance. That prompted several elected officials to spring to the volunteers’ defense.

Council member Nancy Otto said the fact reviewers worked in pairs makes impropriety a far-fetched prospect. “I have a very hard time believing,” she said, “that our police volunteers lack integrity to that degree, I tell ya.”  The volunteers have passed background checks and typically help the police in several ways, including clerical work and issuing parking tickets. They allowed the city to avoid the steep costs of hiring election judges, city manager Mike Redlinger said.  Altenburg responded that the issue was not a matter of the volunteers’ integrity, but rather of public perception.

In response to an Altenburg query Wenger told the council that she asked the police department for the volunteers. In an earlier interview, police chief David Ebinger said that using police volunteers was his idea. “To draw the conclusion that the people involved would do anything other than an honest and through job,” he said, “would be to draw a grossly erroneous conclusion.”  Tepley and other petition organizers aren’t convinced. Using police volunteers, Tepley said, “makes it really suspicious to me.” Representatives of Mellow Mood, which spearheaded the signature-gathering effort, expressed disappointment that the petition failed, but declined further comment. Though the Mellow Mood east of downtown closed after the ban, the Main Avenue location remains open, focusing on clothing, wooden pipes and other legal merchandise. Across the street, the neon lights are still on, but a sign says Pyromaniacs is “closed for remodeling.” A few blocks down Main, Tepley shuttered his Moorhead Discontent shop in January and moved inventory to other cities.

Tepley said he’s tired but he’s going to continue fighting the ordinance – with the petition effort and in the courts. He said Monday he’s considering opening up his store as a venue to fix discarded petitions. And he and his employees filed two federal lawsuits in Minneapolis on Friday that claim the police chief plans to enforce the ordinance in an unconstitutional way.  Since it took effect no prosecutions or arrests have been made.  Ideally, Tepley said, he’d like to reopen and sell his business to his employees. But he said he has a standing offer from the Last Place on Earth to purchase his Moorhead store. The controversial Duluth smoke shop continues to sell synthetic marijuana, defying a 2011 statewide ban. A message for the owner was not returned as of press time.  “If I get too tired of it, I’m not going to give my business away,” Tepley said. “Get ready for him.”

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