Bayview Referendum Invalidated

San Francisco City Attorney Invalidates Bayview Redevelopment Referendum
by Randy Shaw,
2006-09-19

The City Attorney's Office has issued a legal ruling this morning invalidating the recently-qualified referendum on Bayview Redevelopment. The ruling is based on the petition's failure to include all of the documents incorporated by reference into the Ordinance creating the Redevelopment Area.

These missing documents would have added several pages to the referendum petitions, which did include the text of the Ordinance itself. In a case cited by the City Attorney, a petition failed to include an addendum that was several hundreds pages long. Although attaching a phone-book size document to the petition would have made signature gathering impossible, the Court of Appeal in Nelson v. Carlson 17 Cal.App. 4th 732 (1993) rejected the petitions for not including the giant document.

The City Attorney's ruling, after requested to investigate the issue by Mayor Newsom and Supervisors Peskin and Maxwell, will almost certainly be challenged in the courts. But it does explain the lack of mayoral and political reaction to the referendum's qualifying, as political insiders may have been tipped off as to the measure's legal infirmities.

More:
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3697#more