Strong-mayor supporters vow to get initiative on ballot
A group that fell short of collecting the required number of voter signatures to place an initiative on the November ballot vowed Monday to get the job done by early next week.
“If the (city) clerk needs more signatures, we’re going to get them for her,” said Kevin Walker, director of Citizens for Accountable Leadership.
Plans call for volunteers and paid workers to collect signatures door-to-door, as well as at events in different parts of the city. Voters also can sign petitions from noon to 8 p.m. outside Nosh restaurant, 121 S. Tejon St., daily, starting today, Walker said.
“We had to have a contingency plan in case the clerk decided that we didn’t have enough (signatures), so we’ve always had a plan for what to do,” he said.
The group wants to ask Colorado Springs voters whether the city’s longstanding council-manager form of government should be replaced with a strong-mayor system, giving the mayor broad new powers and a yearly salary of about $96,000. Under the current form of government, a city manager appointed by the City Council oversees day-to-day operations.
The group needed to collect 25,091 signatures from registered city voters to get the proposed charter change on the Nov. 2 ballot.
Though it submitted more than 36,000 signatures, only 23,647 were deemed valid.
The group plans to spend coming days collecting 3,000 signatures, more than double the 1,444 signatures needed now to get the proposal on the ballot.
Denver-based Rocky Mountain Voter Outreach, which was paid nearly $65,000 to gather voter signatures, will redeploy more than a dozen workers, Walker said. The company won’t charge to collect more signatures, he said.
“We had an arrangement to get a certain number of good signatures, and they didn’t get them, so they’re going to fix the problem,” Walker said.
City Clerk Kathryn Young was unavailable for comment, and Deputy City Clerk Cindy Conway did not return calls. In an e-mail to Walker, Young said she needed two days to print petitions and that the group would have seven days to collect signatures. The group is allowed a “cure period” to collect the remaining number of signatures.
Despite the tight timeframe, Walker said he isn’t feeling as much pressure as when the signature-gathering effort first got underway.
“The start of the 36,000 was a lot scarier than the start of 3,000,” he said.
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