Some voters will be excluded on petition for legal sales in county

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June 25, 2012

Some voters will be excluded on petition for legal sales in county

By Benjamin Bullard The Cullman Times The Cullman Times Mon Jun 25, 2012, 09:00 AM CDT

CULLMAN — While there are still some legal questions to be answered, backers of a petition to hold a wet/dry vote in Cullman County now know that a significant chunk of the voting population won't play a role in the process.

According to organizer Dale Lamar, the matter of whether voters in Hanceville and Cullman can participate in the petition, as well as have their active registered voter populations counted among the thousands of names needed to force a county wet/dry referendum, has been settled.

"I found out yesterday that the City of Cullman and Hancville would be taken out," said Lamar Friday, four days after submitting more than 5,000 petition signatures calling for a vote on the matter.

State law excludes voters in wet cities from participating in the larger county's effort to hold its own referendum on liquor sales, since those cities' residents take part in separate referenda to decide that issue at the local level. Both Cullman and Hanceville have elected to go wet in municipal votes over the past 18 months.

Still to be determined by county voting officials are the target numbers — minus the signatures of any Hanceville or Cullman voters — the current wet/dry petition must reach in order for a referendum to move forward.

Lamar has tended the petition through more than a year of gains and setbacks. There's been a lot of redundant activity, with some petition sheets mysteriously disappearing from county convenience store counters — only to be replaced with fresh ones, Lamar said, before they disappeared again.

"Yeah, call it what you will — some of them have gone missing, or they've been taken or misplaced or whatever — but I'm not upset about it at this point. Right now, everything I'm hearing from folks about it has just been really positive.

"I think people are finally starting to see the benefit; how Cullman and Hanceville are getting their share of the money that folks were spending out of the county. What I'm hearing more than anything else is, 'Why can't the county be part of that?' What's good for the cities would be good for the county, too."

Still, as elections officials circle in on the target number needed to get a referendum off the ground, Lamar admits to some agitation over how slowly the answers are coming — particularly over the question of when, exactly, the board of registrars must recognize the date his petition has been filed.

"They wanted to know if i had any more names to add to what I turned in [last] Monday — and I do — but I wouldn't want this to become a dead issue because of that," he said. "Without knowing a firm number we've got to reach for, I don't know how many names I still lack. I still have more sheets out there that I'm tracking down; that I can still turn in if I need to."

Pinpointing the petition's submission date is important, since state law requires that a referendum be scheduled no later than 45 days from the date a successful petition is submitted.

Title 28 of the Code of Alabama makes separate provisions for the manner in which cities and counties move through the process of qualifying for, and holding, referenda on liquor sales.

In the case of unincorporated counties such as Cullman, the Code requires that petitions calling for a vote must collect signatures from at least 25 percent of the registered county voters who took part in the most recent general election — in this case, the general election of November 2010. That election drew more than 30,000 voters countywide.

Check The Cullman Times this week for an update from voting officials on how many petition signatures the wet/dry movement must yield.

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Some voters will be excluded on petition for legal sales in county

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