Pitfalls of Petitions

Petitioning your government is an attractive and important element of democracy that gives ordinary citizens both influence and a feeling of involvement. As two groups of citizens have found recently in the White River Valley, however, there are limits to the way petitions can be used. One lesson seems to be that even groups of petitioning citizens ought to seek guidance from a lawyer.

In Randolph a month ago, a petition was put together by a group of people who are opposed to extending the police district outside the current village boundaries to the town as a whole. Police district expansion was a proposal of Town Manager Peter Butterfield, who sees it as a way of providing better service while more fairly spreading the cost of the service among all Randolph citizens, not just those who live in the downtown police district.

The Randolph selectboard had been holding informational meetings on Butterfield’s proposal and were also considering other ways of meeting some of he same objectives. Quite a number of people living outside the village, however, were worried about the idea about spreading police costs to the town as a whole. That meant new taxes, for sure, and they questioned whether the benefits would be worthwhile. So they wrote up a petition about it.

What the petitioners asked, however, was not that the town DO something or other. They asked that the town selectboard simply stop considering any plan to expand the police district unless asked to do so by people from outside the district.

The selectmen very wisely declined to accept the policing petition. Chairman Jim Hutchinson succinctly explained that the petition amounted to asking the selectboard not to do its job. It’s the duty of any selectboard to consider all aspects of whatever issues its members think important. The more investigation the better. Any petition that instructs town officials not to investigate certain solutions may be used by the officials as an expression of opinion on the part of the petitioners, but not as a document that has any legal standing whatsoever.

The second petition flap occurred just this week, with regards to a petition brought by 152 Royalton voters who wanted a "revote" of the town’s Sept. 11 authorization of a bond issue to build a new gymnasium and other improvements.

The opportunity to demand a new vote on budgets, bond issues, and other issues is a longtime feature of Vermont law, though it has been considered a very annoying feature for hundreds of town officials in dozens of towns who find themselves revoting issues that they thought had been settled.

The Royalton School Board, however, rejected the petition on the unambiguous advice of Atty. Paul Giuliani. The law, he said, allows a petition to "rescind" or to "reconsider" a vote, but not to "revote." To non-lawyers, this distinction sounds like a pretty technical, unimportant distinction, but Giuliani is one of the state’s foremost experts on municipal procedure, and he gave the Royalton school board little wiggle-room to actually consider the petition.

Therefore, the Sept. 11 vote will apparently stand, regardless of the petition. Royalton voters might reflect, however, that they have voted on a school gym three times already. The first two, much more expensive, proposals were rejected, until on Sept. 11 they found a proposal that they could vote for.