Finance ballot effort rejected

A ballot proposal to require a public vote on most borrowing by the city of Newport Beach didn’t get enough valid signatures to earn a spot on the November ballot, the Orange County Registrar of Voters said Friday.

Backed by residents group Newporters for Responsible Government, the initiative would have given voters the right to decide whether city officials could borrow money for public projects that would take longer than two years to pay back or would total more than $3 million.

The registrar determined that the group came up 186 valid signatures short of the required 6,006.

“That is very surprising, but I guess when people sign once, they sign again, so maybe that’s what happened,” said Dolores Otting, a member of Newporters for Responsible Government who helped collect signatures.

Duplicate signatures were the reason for most of the disqualified signatures on the petitions, which included a total of 7,410 signatures. The registrar determined that nearly 800 signatures were duplicates, and others were incomplete or from people who weren’t registered voters, or were registered at a different address.

The initiative drive was prompted by the City Council’s $48-million plan to replace City Hall and a fire station and to add parking.

The initiative’s intent was to close what proponents called a loophole in the city charter ? a public vote is required to pay for city projects with bonds because they raise residents’ property taxes, but no vote is necessary to use certificates of participation, a similar financing method that doesn’t impose a direct tax increase.

Officials had proposed using the certificates to pay for the new civic center complex.

Otting has chastised officials for saying the civic center plan will cost $48 million, when financing and other costs will make the final total closer to $100 million. She’s even more concerned about a list of future facilities needs that the city pegs at $160 million but she expects to be at least twice that.

“If it’s private money and you’re buying your own home, who cares, but when it’s public money and it’s being paid for out of the general fund with tax dollars, people need to know the total price,” Otting said.

Councilman Tod Ridgeway said the initiative’s failure to qualify means the city can move ahead with the civic center project without having to worry about whether it can get funding.

“At the end of the day, I think that most of the citizens don’t care, quite candidly, about the financing of the city hall or whether we have a new one or not,” he said.