The city of St. George incorporation petition drive comes to an end today, and organizers say they have collected more than the 2,700 signatures needed to get the incorporation measure on a fall ballot. Still, it’s unclear whether those signatures will be enough to bring the issue to a vote.
That’s because opponents of the St. George movement have been working furiously to encourage those who may have changed their mind on the issue to remove their signatures from the petition, and they can continue with that effort until an election is called, provided it is.
“We know we have hit the number but we don’t know how many signatures (the opposition) has been able to have removed,” says St. George spokesman Lionel Rainey. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
St. George organizers have spent the past few weeks collecting the additional signatures, since more than 2,000 on the original petition they submitted in early April were found to be invalid. In recent days, they have stepped up their efforts, running newspaper ads, using social media and sending direct mail pieces.
One of the contentious issues in the final days of the campaign has been the size of their proposed budget and whether it will mean higher taxes for residents of the proposed city. St. George organizers have said in public statements and in their newspaper ads that taxes will not go up, basing the assertion on an audit of their proposed budget prepared by a national CPA firm, Carr, Riggs and Ingram.
However, officials with East Baton Rouge Parish government contend the CRI report is based on flawed data, erroneously counting revenue for St. George from the north Baton Rouge industrial corridor, which is not in the footprint of the proposed city.
“The industrial corridor is a huge pocket of the unincorporated portion of the parish that is not in the proposed St. George,” East Baton Rouge Parish Chief Financial Officer Marsha Hanlon says.
Rainey says St. George organizers stand by their numbers and the report, not that the issue makes much difference at this point. Though organizers will continue to collect signatures throughout the night, Rainey says the effort is essentially over.
“We have done what everybody said was impossible,” he says. “Whether that will be enough to counter the withdrawals, I don’t know, but we’ve done everything we possibly could and I think it would be hard to deny at this point that this deserves to be on the ballot.”
—Stephanie Riegel
