It may be some time — if ever at all — before the long-gestating petition to bring a referendum on countywide alcohol sales collects enough signatures to force a referendum.
But, said petition organizer Dale Lamar Tuesday, the effort is far from finished.
“It’s not dead; by no means,” said Lamar. “I’m still collecting. The big thing I want to get across, in plain English, is that city residents, Hanceville residents — everybody in the county, regardless of where they live — can sign this petition. Those are the signatures we’re going after right now.”
Lamar turned in his first large batch of petition signatures to the Cullman County Board of Registrars last month, but he’s still organizing additional signed petition sheets he’s been collecting since that time. Lamar said he plans to submit those in the near future, while continuing to focus on collecting additional signatures, in wet cities such as Cullman and Hanceville, that he’d believed were off-limits when he first started the effort more than a year ago.
“It’s been confusing for sure,” said Lamar. “I’d first been told that you couldn’t sign the petition if you lived in Cullman, and then in Hanceville, because they both went ‘wet’. But the law doesn’t say anything about certain people not being able to sign the petition, except that they have to be a qualified voter in the county where the petition is going on.”
Section 28-2A-1 of the Code of Alabama does forbid residents of wet municipalities from actually voting in a referendum to decide whether the outlying county can sell liquor. But, Section 28-2-1, which prescribes how a county wet/dry petition must proceed, doesn’t distinguish between municipal residents and residents of unincorporated portions of the county, for purposes of adding their names to the petition.
Lamar began the petition in February of last year. Probate Judge Leah Patterson Lust said Tuesday there’s no deadline limiting the amount of time the petition can circulate before reaching the required number of signatures.
“The Code of Alabama does not stipulate a deadline for obtaining signatures on a wet/dry petition,” said Lust.
While Lamar has plenty of time to keep the petition active, the process becomes more complicated as time passes. That’s because qualified voters who signed it in its early days may die, or move out of the county, or see a similar change in their eligibility in the time that’s lapsed since they signed their names.
Lamar said he’s not deterred.
“As long as the people are still signing the petitions, I’ll still be doing it,” he said. “I’m really just tying to help the county have a little bit of this revenue that Cullman and Hanceville are getting.”
* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.
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