LAKEPORT– Save Our Seniors (SOS), the group behind the push to get a senior mobile home rent control initiative on the ballot, has collected enough signatures to qualify for next year”s Lakeport city election.
SOS volunteers, who in late spring set up tables on weekends in front of Grocery Outlet and Safeway in Lakeport, qualified for the November, 2014 ballot with 317 valid signatures — 47 more than needed, according to Lake County Registrar of Voters Diane Fridley.
Fridley put her stamp of authenticity — the “Elections Official”s Certificate of Examination”– on the list of signatures and passed it on to city officials Wednesday.
SOS has until Oct. 9 to collect Strasser”s goal of 2,100 signatures he thinks are needed to get the same initiative on the countywide ballot in 2014.
“The county version is going well,” SOS founder Nelson Strasser said in an email Wednesday. “We have a few months to go until the deadline and we have more than enough signatures, but inevitably, a percentage of those will be thrown out, so we will continue gathering signatures until the deadline.”
To qualify in Lakeport, the group needed valid signatures from 10 percent of the 2,699 registered voters (as of October, 2012), and it turned in 690 to the registrar”s office — enough of a cushion to compensate for the 373 signatures that were judged to be invalid, according to Fridley.
The most common causes of disqualification were the signers didn”t live in Lakeport (24.2 percent), they no longer lived at the same address as when they registered to vote (13.6 percent), and they were not registered to vote (10.3 percent).
Strasser, a Lakeport mobile home resident, spearheaded the signature drive on the grounds that steep and often arbitrary rent hikes can have a devastating impact on seniors who live on fixed incomes.
If the SOS initiative passes, rent increases would be tied to increases in Social Security benefits.
Rich Mellott is a staff reporter for Lake County Publishing. He can be reached at 263-5636, ext. 14 or rmellott@record-bee.com.
