Cedar Rapids schools’ $220M bond proceeds to ballot

CEDAR RAPIDS — A $220 million general obligation bond referendum will be on the ballot next month for voters within the Cedar Rapids Community School District after some challenges to 1,333 of the signatures collected to move forward with the vote were disputed by an election objection committee Monday.

The challenge to the petition was emailed last Thursday to school officials and The Gazette by Richard David, who is running this fall for a Cedar Rapids school board at-large seat. In his email, he said the petition — which required about 6,300 eligible voters in the district to sign it for it to be considered for the Nov. 7 ballot — was reviewed by “a group of concerned voters” who live in the district.

While the election objection committee Monday sustained some of the objections, the majority of the objections were overruled — leaving enough valid signatures for the district to take the bond issue to voters.

School board President David Tominsky said he feels the district “took that extra step” in verifying petition signatures. “A lot of the objections were things we had already caught,” he said.

“I think the community worked hard to gather signatures and to follow the law. Now it’s up to voters to make that decision,” Tominsky said.

The committee, formed under a process outline in Iowa law, was made up of Tominsky, school board secretary Ryan Rydstrom and school board member Nancy Humbles, who was chosen by a vote by the board Monday. Beth Grob and Emily Kolbe, lawyers with Ahlers & Cooney, the law firm representing the district, were also present.

The Cedar Rapids school board unanimously approved a resolution Sept. 21 ordering the election after the district received 6,909 valid signatures, more than what was required under Iowa law.

Volunteers with a “Vote Yes to Invest” committee had collected 7,624 signatures, but about 700 of them were considered invalid because signers did not include the date they signed or an address within the district boundaries. Signatures were verified by Rydstrom and two other district officials.

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Iowa law specifies the school board determines the validity of the petition, according to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.

The committee considered each objection but did not examine each signature that was objected to. Some of the sustained objections — which could have been counted in 700 signatures the district initially considered invalid — included signatures with invalid addresses and signatures with arrows instead of proper ditto marks. Ditto marks, however, are a valid way of indicating repetition from the line above, Grob said.

The group challenging the bond petition asserted some signatures are invalid for the following reasons:

Another complaint disputed by the committee was that some signers had signed under multiple names. Iowa law allows for a person to sign a petition for another person with consent, Grob said. There was no evidence provided to the committee that some of the signatures were provided without consent.

Finally, the committee rejected the challenge to some addresses being invalid. For example, one address the challenge pointed to was a business address. Gob, however, responded that “homeless people also are allowed to sign the petition.”

Dean Soenksen said he was one of about a dozen of the “concerned voters” who challenged the petition. He himself spent about 25 hours examining the signatures. “It was quite a team that worked on this.”

The Linn County Auditor’s Office postponed ordering ballots to be printed for the Nov. 7 election because of the challenge. The ballots will be ordered this week. Early voting begins Oct. 18 — in just over two weeks. To pass, the bond referendum must receive at least 60 percent of the vote.

Comments: (319) 398-8411; grace.king@thegazette.com