Petition Drive

A state appeals court has refused to revive a petition that would allow Howard County voters to weigh in on the zoning approval for a supermarket at a proposed shopping center in Turf Valley. The county's elections officials correctly decided that opponents of the supermarket failed to garner enough valid petition signatures needed to place the store's zoning approval on the ballot, a state appeals court ruled last week. The challenge to the 2008 zoning change was brought by the Howard County Citizens for Open Government.

A ruling by the state's highest court that a Montgomery County referendum should be on next month's ballot despite questions over disqualified petition signatures is giving new hope to the leaders of two failed petition drives in Howard County — one challenging new zoning for downtown Columbia and another fighting an expanded grocery store at Turf Valley. The court ruled Sept. 29 that a challenge to Montgomery County fees for emergency ambulance service should appear on the ballot in November.

A Green Party operative gathering signatures at Ellicott City's Charles E. Miller branch library to keep the group on Maryland's 2012 election ballot was pepper-sprayed and arrested by Howard County police, who charged him with trespassing and resisting arrest. That much about the Dec. 18 incident is not in dispute, but practically everything else is, highlighting a sore subject in Maryland, and especially in Howard County — the difficulty in mounting a successful petition drive.

In April, when Del. Neil C. Parrott, a first-year legislator from Washington County, began challenging a new state law that gives college tuition discounts to illegal immigrants, many in his own Republican Party thought his petition drive would fail. He lacked the national support, the cash and the organizational structure that most believed was needed to have a law put on the ballot in Maryland, which hasn't happened in 20 years. But Parrott's unexpectedly rapid progress — by Friday the state had approved nearly 80 percent of the needed petition signatures — has surprised and delighted Republican leaders.

The Carroll County Citizens for Charter Government will collect signatures at several locations this weekend.Volunteers are looking for about 700 more signers to reach their goal of 4,000.A successful petition drive would force the County Commissioners to appoint a board that would write a charter. The charter issue could appear on the ballot as early as November 1998. If voters approved charter, the county government would change from three commissioners to a county executive and council.

This is the easy part, leaders of the Vote Know Coalition say. By midnight Friday, the anti-abortion organization campaigningto petition Maryland's new abortion law to referendum must deliver its first installment of signatures to the secretary of state."

Opponents of comprehensive rezoning in Harford County -- which was to have gone into effect today -- have stalled the process until next year, gathering enough signatures in a petition drive to put the issue on the 1998 ballot.Robert D. Dillon, an organizer of the petition drive, said yesterday that his group has collected 9,008 signatures from residents frustrated with the fast pace of development in Harford.The group needed to get signatures of 5,392 residents -- 5 percent of the county's 107,839 registered voters -- for the issue to be placed on the primary ballot in September.

Enlisting the help of churches across Maryland, abortion opponents are confident of gathering enough signatures on petitions to send the state's recently passed abortion bill to referendum.Volunteers began their petition drive in earnest Sunday, collecting signatures of registered voters in dozens of churches in Baltimore and perhaps hundreds across the state after Mother's Day services, according to organizers.Under the state constitution, anti-abortion activists must collect 33,373 signatures -- or 3 percent of the qualified voters in the state -- by the end of June to put the issue on the ballot in November 1992.

A petition drive seeking a referendum on a proposal to remake the City Council into 18 single-member districts is in danger of failing because the drive's leaders did not file financial disclosure statements with the election board.The city Board of Supervisors of Elections is scheduled to meet Monday to decide the fate of the petition effort.Last week, city Finance Director William R. Brown Jr. wrote a letter to elections board officials saying he could not certify the 15,159 signatures turned in Aug. 12 by the drive's organizers.

A petition drive seeking a referendum on a proposal to remake the Baltimore City Council into 18 single-member districts is in danger of failing because the drive's leaders did not file financial disclosure statements with the election board.The city Board of Supervisors of Elections is scheduled to meet Monday to decide the fate of the petition effort.Last week, city Finance Director William R. Brown Jr. wrote a letter to elections board officials saying he could not certify the 15,159 signatures turned in Aug. 12 by the drive's organizers.