116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Petition to repeal Iowa City's 21-only law invalid, officials say
University of Iowa students leading the charge to repeal Iowa City's new minimum bar entry age are coming up short.
The city requires 2,500 valid signatures to send the matter back to the city council.
City clerk Marian Karr says the students have only collected about half that many -- 1,273 -- towards the required minimum.
Raj Patel and his YESS group -- Yes to Entertaining Students Safely -- handed in roughly 200 pages of signatures on May 11. At that point, Karr and other city employees began combing through the signatures to determine which of them could be counted.
Karr says there are a number of reasons that a petition signature can be ruled invalid, including the following: the petition signer isn't a registered voter in Iowa City, the petitioner's address does not match that of the Johnson County voting records, or city employees can't decipher the petitioner's information due to poor handwriting.
Karr finished examining the petition Saturday.
A certificate of insufficiency will tell Patel what he must do next if he wants to continue to push the city council to repeal the so-called 21-only ordinance.
Those requirements include the following: Patel must file a notice of intention to amend his petition within two days after he receives a copy of the certificate. He then may file a supplementary petition upon additional papers within 15 days after receiving a copy of this certificate. The petition may only be amended once for lack of the required number of valid signatures.
Patel said his group was still actively collecting signatures just in case these weren't enough. If Patel's group can't come up with the necessary signatures to validate the petition, there will not be a a vote on this issue in the fall.
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Ryan Lopez checks ID's as people come through the door at Studio 13 in downtown Iowa City on Thursday, May 13, 2010. (Julie Koehn/The Gazette)
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