La Center residents will soon have one more tool to use when they want their voices heard by local elected officials.
This month, the La Center City Council is expected to adopt the initiative and referendum process residents worked months to acquire. The council was presented with a petition for the right in November and in December announced its intention to adopt the process. On March 24, the 90 days for challenges to the petition will have ended, allowing the city council to adopt an ordinance giving registered voters the right of the initiative and referendum.
“There were several citizens in La Center who were of the collective opinion that the council wasn’t listening to what the citizens were trying to tell them,” said Erin Nolan, who was in the citizens’ group collecting petition signatures and whose husband, Mike Nolan, has been on the city council since 2008.
“We thought maybe (the petition) was a way to proceed to make a statement to them that our views were important,” she added.
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The initiative and referendum process gives voters the right to petition to place proposed legislation on the ballot. The state adopted the process in 1912 — one of the first states to do so. All the other cities in the county have the right. The city of Vancouver included it as part of its charter, approved by voters in 1952. Battle Ground, Ridgefield, Camas and Washougal adopted the right in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Tim Likness, county elections supervisor. La Center was classified as a town until September 1993 and therefore didn’t qualify to offer the right, Likness said. None of the residents of those cities, except Vancouver, have exercised those rights, he said.
Nolan said no single issue sparked the La Center movement. Instead, it was the perception of council members’ not listening to community input on various issues, including those surrounding the sewer system and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s proposed resort, she said.
“The citizenry needs somebody to protect their interests, and I guess there have been some instances in the past where it appears the citizen/resident voice is overshadowed by special interests,” said Nolan, who has lived in La Center since 2002.
The group of about a dozen community members launched the petition drive in late August. By November, the group had gathered 663 signatures, 579 of which were verified by the county auditor. The petition required 437 signatures, which is more than 50 percent of the number of ballots cast in the last municipal election.
The council unanimously passed a resolution in December declaring its intent to enact the process after a 90-day appeal period. Had the council not agreed to implement the process, the issue would have gone to voters for approval.
Nolan said the group hoped the petition would send a message to council members that they needed to listen to the community. And the voters’ message didn’t end there. In November, the citizens also elected two new city council members, Al Luiz and Barbara Vining, and re-elected Bill Birdwell. The voters replaced council members who were ignoring their constituents with people more receptive to residents’ opinions, Nolan said.
“The standing council members that were in opposition (to the petition) were not re-elected,” she said. “That kind of says it all, in my opinion.”
Mayor Jim Irish said the petition was a wake-up call heard by the entire council.
“It should have showed everybody, including myself, that if they weren’t informed then I and the council are not doing our jobs of keeping the public informed,” he said.
Birdwell agreed. He said the petition showed him how important it is to hold community meetings and ask for public opinion before making big decisions.
And while the process may never be needed in La Center, at least now it’s a possibility, Nolan said.
“It was about democracy, and we as citizens have a right to do this,” she said. “This was about giving the citizens a voice.”
