12/6/2023 0 Comments Being in limbo at workOrganizers have modeled the referendum campaign after a successful effort in coastal Georgia, where Camden County residents voted overwhelmingly last year to block county officials from building a launchpad for blasting commercial rockets into space. ![]() In prior legal filings, city and state attorneys have called the effort to allow voters to decide the issue “futile” and “invalid,” saying the state’s referendum process does not allow for the reversal of the city’s lease agreement central to the project. ![]() Organizers say they ultimately need 58,203 valid signatures - the equivalent of 15% of registered voters as of the last city election.īut the city says none of the forms will be examined until it gets a decision from the appeals court. Forms can also be tossed if the signature does not match what officials have on file, a restriction that activists have decried as “voter suppression.” Dickens, one of the chief proponents of the training center, has said he didn’t believe the petition drive would be successful “if it’s done honestly.”įor a petition to be counted, the signatory must be a City of Atlanta resident who has been registered to vote since the 2021 city election. The city had previously said it plans to pore over each signature and toss any that do not meet the qualifications, unless the resident fixes the issue. They’ve decided that we should have a say in how our public resources are spent.” They’ve decided that our democracy matters and we should be a part of it. “They’ve decided that environmental concerns won’t go unnoticed. “Today we go from ‘Let the people decide,’ to ‘The people have decided,’” Britney Whaley of the Working Families Party said during a celebratory news conference outside City Hall on Monday before the city refused to process the forms. The Atlanta City Council has repeatedly voted in favor of the $90 million, 85-acre (34-hectare) campus, despite hours of outraged public testimony against the plan. The signature-gathering effort, unprecedented in its size in Georgia history, was the result of the work of hundreds of canvassers who spread out across the city over the past three months to convince voters that they should get to decide the project’s fate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |