Alcohol sales ban to go to a vote
Group collects enough signatures to have public decide on proposal

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — It took more than three months, but a local group of citizens has finally collected enough signatures to turn its dream of a pre-noon ban on alcohol sales within city limits into a public referendum.

City Clerk Patricia Holland signed off by noon Tuesday on the last of 571 valid signatures, a slim 18 more than the minimum number of signatures the group needed by state law to trigger the referendum.

Now that the clerk's office has enough signatures, it's up to the City Council to set the date for the referendum, which could happen as soon as Tuesday evening.

A spokesperson for the Gallup Alcohol Action Team, the group that collected the signatures, could not be reached for comment.

The Action Team is a recently formed non-profit claiming some 25 members of many stripes joined in an effort to alleviate public intoxication and irresponsible liquor sales in Gallup. It took on its first mission, to ban the sale of alcohol before noon, when the City Council found out it could not impose the ban itself. The councilors who liked the idea encouraged the city's citizens to make it happen instead. State law insists that citywide restrictions on alcohol sales be driven by the electorate. The Gallup Alcohol Action Team took up the challenge.

State law also stipulates that those citizens must collect signatures from at least 5 percent of the city's registered voters within a 90-day period to trigger a referendum.

The group, which announced its plan Sept. 2, hoped to have all its signatures in by the 20th. But complications slowed it down.

There was the usual problem most petitions face collecting valid signatures: people who don't write down their full address; those who write down the wrong address; others who sign but don't live within city limits. All can disqualify a signature.

According to one member of the group, there was also some confusion about exactly how many signatures it needed. Going on some preliminary information, the group thought it needed approximately 450, which turned out to be roughly 100 short of the mark.

Although the group was collecting signatures before going public with its plan Sept. 2, the 90 days it had to collect them all did not begin until Dec. 26, said Holland, when it handed in its first batch of names along with the official voter roll, which the group had to get from the McKinley County Office of Elections. By Dec. 20, just six days before the deadline, the group was still scrambling for 23 names.

Although the City Council has no choice about holding the referendum now that the signatures are in, it has the final say within the guidelines set by the state to pick the day. The city cannot hold the referendum within 42 days of a school board election or a general election. That, said Holland, limits the council to picking a day in late March or early April.

The city can't stop the election, but the courts still could. Although the Action Team claims to have the signatures of some local liquor license owners, it's also expecting to be challenged on the very legality of the referendum by other license owners less enthused about the prospect of not being allowed to do business before noon.

According to City Attorney George Kozeliski, the state's laws on this sort of referendum have the legal community divided. There's some question about whether it can take on the hours of alcohol sales at all. By some interpretations, it can only ask voters to ban sales on Sundays already the case in Gallup or make the city completely dry.

If a challenge comes, it's a fine point that may have to be sorted out by the courts, Kozeliski said.

The Gallup Alcohol Action Team hopes that a pre-noon ban on alcohol sales will cut down on the number of intoxicated people who roam the city's streets and the problems that accompany them. Some critics fear the ban will only drive the most alcohol dependent of them to more dangerous substances like "ocean," a mixture of water and hair spray.