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Show Sponsors Explain Position On Referendum The sponsors of the requested Referendum of the SHithern Utah Power company franchise feel that a word of explanation of their motives, now that the city has refused to receive the referendum refer-endum petition, is called for. In the first place, we deem the action of the city council on Feb. 19 as hasty and ill considered, although entirely legal. The matter mat-ter had never been . discussed even at a prior council meeting with all councilmen present, let alone holding any public hearings. hear-ings. Action such as this is foreign for-eign to our American system of government. Now that the action ac-tion has been taken by the council, coun-cil, the only way the public rights can be protected is to allow al-low them to vote upon the question. ques-tion. There Is certainly nothing more American than this. Granting Grant-ing of 20-year franchise is certainly cer-tainly an important matter and if this action will not bear the ! light of a public vote, then surely sure-ly it should not have been taken ta-ken in the first place by the Mayor and only three council-men. council-men. Allowing the public to vote ,upon a matter is the protection of probably the most fundamental fundamen-tal right in all government. A referendum petition has been painstakingly circulated in Cedar City in which the signers merely request the city to submit this question to a vote. The signers have taken no stand or sides in the question and are not committed commit-ted in any way. This petition was signed by 449 residents of Cedar City and 430 of these signatures have been certified by the County Clerk as being registered voters. Only 390 signatures were actually actual-ly necessary. Still the city has -efused to accept the petition on he ground that it carried NO names of registered voters. No reason f"r the refusal to accept it has been officially given and there has been no official explanation ex-planation of how come a petition peti-tion with 430 certified names in reality has no names. We do not know by what process of seasoning sea-soning the 430 names are ignored ig-nored completely. We have been orivately told by city officials that the reason is because the County Clerk's certificate stated that he had ehcckel the names )t registered voters BEFORE the name, whereas the checks an-oar an-oar AFTEP the name. Admittedly Admitted-ly this wps a simnlo mistake -nd has b"on so exolained to the city by the snonsors and also by he County Clerk. But the petition peti-tion was self " explanatory as to who were registered voters and the certificate of the County Clerk (Continued on Back Page) REFERENDUM (Continued from Page One) certified that there were 430, regardless re-gardless of how they were checked. It should be obvious that this was not a REASON for turning the petition down but only an EXCUSE. ! Frankly we are unable to understand un-derstand the action of the city officials. They should want to submit this question to a vote instead of looking for every technical tech-nical excuse for not doing so. After Af-ter all, they are elected to serve the public and there is no way to gather public sentiment better than letting the people decide. It seems we have reached a sorry state in our city affairs when residents of the city, in order to have a say upon a very important municipal matter, and which has been legally requested by 430 people, still have to stand i the expense of going to the Su-1 preme Court of the State of Utah to compel the city to do only what it should want to do. The sponsors are filing this action in the Supreme Court for the reason that they consider the action of the city arbitrary and illegal and we know of n deficiency in the referendum petition. We feel entirely en-tirely confident that the Supreme Court will order this question submitted to the people who will decide this Important question. Any decisions made by the people, peo-ple, eve-? though we personally may nt agree with the action, are always right. Sponsors of Referendum Petition: |