Onorato appeals drink tax referendum ruling

The future of the drink tax remains murky as another appeal has been put on the… The future of the drink tax remains murky as another appeal has been put on the table.

County Council launched a referendum for the November ballot earlier this summer that asked if voters would prefer raised property taxes in exchange for a repeal of the drink tax. The County Board of Elections denied the question previously this month, but Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato recently made an appeal for the question.

County Council is not responsible for the appeal, said district seven County Council member Nicholas Futules. Rather. Onorato made the appeal in the Common Pleas Court last Tuesday on his own accord.

Futules believes Onorato acted independently because the majority of County Council members likely would not have supported the appeal. Furthermore, Futules thinks Onorato chose to appeal as a safeguard, in case FACT’s appeal passes.

“In my opinion [Onorato is appealing] just because [FACT] appealed,” said Futules.

The Friends Against Counterproductive Taxation group appealed a ruling made by the County Board of Elections beforehand this month. Composed of a group of Allegheny County restaurant owners opposed to the drink tax, FACT’s appeal is pushing for a referendum that will ask voters to reduce the drink tax from 10 percent to 0.5 percent.

FACT secretary John Graf said he is assured County Council’s question will not succeed.

“I am confident that their question violates state and county law,” he said.

Graf added that County Council will never go through with their question’s proposal, meaning they will not actually raise property taxes.

“[The County Council’s referendum question] is a joke. Nobody that passed it believes it has any binding effect,” Graf said.

While both outcomes of FACT’s and Onorato’s appeals are still being decided, Futules said both appeals are unnecessary at this point.

“I believe both of these [referendum] questions are dead in the water, and the issue is over,” said Futules. “FACT was complaining that they’d take [their appeal] all the way to the [Pennsylvania] Supreme Court. I think that’s a complete joke. The only one that’s going to benefit from that is their attorney that’s taking their money.”

Graf said it is likely that the Common Pleas president, Judge Joseph James, will make the rulings on both appeals. Futules said “you have a better chance of being struck by lightning [than both appeals will pass].”

Group questioning FACT’s petition

FACT’s appeal is still under review, but its referendum is under attack from another source. The Citizens Against Raising Property Taxes group is accusing FACT of not obtaining the quota of 23,0006 petition signatures needed to qualify for placing a referendum on the ballot. Composed mainly of lawyers, realtors and business leaders, the group filed the challenge against FACT in court last Tuesday.

FACT spent the summer collecting signatures of Allegheny County citizens and turned in a stack of about 45,000 signed petitions to the County Board of Elections last August. Though 45,000 were handed in, the president of Citizens Against Raising Property Taxes, Shawn Flaherty, said that only 16,794 are actually valid.

“The signer of a legitimate petition had to be a registered voter in Allegheny County, living and residing in Allegheny County at the time he signed the petition,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty explained the steps of filling out one of the petitions.

“It’s not rocket science. Print your name, print your address, apply your signature, and put the date on it,” he said.

Members of Flaherty’s group went through all 45,000 petitions line by line to check their accuracy. Flaherty described the task as “miserable.”

“We painstakingly went through them and matched every name with a voter ID registration card,” Flaherty said.

In the process, CARTOP reported finding a plethora of errors. In addition to coming across signatures from characters such as “Steely McBeam” and “Henry David Thoreau,” they found some petitions incompletely or incorrectly filled out. Petitions were found with blank sections and illegible writing.

Another problem stemmed from certain signatures belonging to non-residents of Allegheny County. Some signers were from as far away as California and Canada, Flaherty said.

FACT did not intentionally collect such “sloppily put together” petitions, Flaherty said, but he believes the group did not put effort into checking the signatures.

“The FACT individuals didn’t go through them. They figured they would throw 44,000 signatures up there and that nobody would take the time or the effort to see who all was capable of signing them,” said Flaherty.

But Graf said FACT vetted the petitions as they came in.

“We were looking at them to check their validity as they came in, and based on those counts we feel pretty confident that we have more than enough signatures,” he said. “If we came across a joke signature, we crossed it out. We’re not going to turn something in with a ‘Captain Crunch’ signature on it.”

Flaherty also reported that some circulators of the petitions were not themselves registered voters living in Allegheny County. If the name and address of the circulator on the back of the petition did not check, his collected signatures were invalidated. Graf answered, however, that there were possibly a few circulators who had only recently registered to vote and that their names were not yet in the system.

Soon after FACT turned the petition signatures in, they were checked by the Allegheny County’s Elections Division. Though they certified approximately 40,000 signatures, Flaherty said their review was cursory and by no means exhaustive.

If FACT does not have enough signatures, it will be unable to advance its referendum.

“At the end of the day if there’s not 23,006 signatures on the petition, then we’re not going to be able to move forward with the referendum,” said Graf.