07 - Certificate of Insufficiency - Petition - To Allow Smoking in a Welding FacilityItem No. 7
Memorandum
TO: Mayor & Council
Grayson Path, City Manager
FROM: Janice Ellis, City Clerk
SUBJECT: CERTIFICATE OF INSUFFICIENCY — INITIATIVE PETITION
TO ALLOW SMOKING IN A WELDING FACILITY
DATE: May 10, 2021
BACKGROUND: On April 22, 2021, the City of Paris received an Initiative Petition to allow
smoking in a Welding Facility.
STATUS OF ISSUE: Section 103 of the Paris City Charter requires that within ten days after an
initiative petition is filed, the city clerk shall determine whether each paper of the petition has a
proper statement of the circulator and whether the petition is signed by a sufficient number of
qualified voters. After completing examination of the petition, the city clerk shall certify the
result thereof to the Council at its next regular meeting.
I reviewed the petition and found it to be insufficient as detailed in the attached Certificate of
Insufficiency. I called Mr. Mark Lester and explained this to him, then followed up with formal
notification to Mr. Lester. Mr. Lester expressed that it was not their intention to take the petition
to a vote of the citizens, but rather to simply make the City Council aware of their interest in the
smoking ordinance being reviewed.
BUDGET: NA.
RECOMMENDATION: This is not an action item.
CERTIFICATE OF INSUFFICIENCY - INITIATIVE PETITION
TO ALLOW SMOKING IN A WELDING FACILITY
I, Janice Ellis, City Clerk of the City of Paris, Texas do hereby certify the initiative petition
received from Mark Lester and filed on April 22, 2021, to be insufficient.
The petition to allow smoking in a Welding Facility failed to meet requirements as set out
in the Texas Election Code §277.002(1)(B), in that the petition did not contain the signers'
date of births and voter registration numbers. In addition, the petition failed to meet
requirements in Paris City Charter Chapter X, Sections 100 and 102. Pursuant to Section
100, the petition should contain signatures of 372 qualified voters (25% of the total number
of votes cast in the cumulative seven districts in the last contested general election for each
district) of the City of Paris; however, it contained 88 signatures and some of which are not
residents of the City of Paris. Charter Section 102 sets out the required form of the petition
which includes the committee of petitioners, affidavits of the committee circulating the
petition and a full text of the proposed ordinance. After review, I found that the
requirements under Section 102 were not adhered to.
Dated this 26th day of April, 2021
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- mice Ellis, City Clerk
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