No Super Wal-Mart

Standing on an legal advice that is not supported by either statue or case law, Mayor Chaney took the advice of City Counsel and refused to let Mark Solomon present a petition with the signatures of 561 Moscow residents.

Mark Solomon addressed the Council offering his opinion about the ability of the Council to hear and accept a petition organized by the group NoSuperWalMart. Randy Fife, City Attorney, advises that the city not accept the petition because the matter is “before Council,” by which he seems to mean that an application has been received City staff.

The petition is asking the Council to review the changes to the comprehensive plan (read the petition here, sign it online too). When the discussion was over, the petition was not delivered to the Council. Councilman Ament asked the Mayor how 800 people can call a special election but the Council can’t hear from 561 of them. In a few days I expect to have a podcast of the audio from this portion of the meeting, meanwhile, you can read emails between Mayor Chaney, Randy Fife, and Mark Solomon discussing this issue in this blog.

There are four email exchanges leading up to the Council meeting:
Mark, Nancy, Mark: Jan 13
Randy, Mark, Randy: Jan 13
Mark to Randy: Jan17
Replies Randy, Mark: Jan 17

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 8:57 am and is filed under Official. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.