talkWaterford

From the Arlington Advocate:

Voters may get a chance to decriminalize marijuana, ban dog racing and free themselves of the state’s income tax next year, but they won’t have a chance to kill the state’s affordable housing law.

A 2008 ballot initiative would have repealed key parts of the state’s 40B affordable housing statute, which allow developers to circumvent local zoning regulations if 25 percent of their units are affordable.

“We feel this law is a failure,” said Arlington resident John Belskis, a retired telephone company worker. “I guess we attempted to get Legislators to do something meaningful with this law and get something that truly creates affordable housing.”

Belskis said he was prompted to file the petition after a developer tried to build on a buried toxic landfill near his home. Although Belskis has said supporters in all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns are fed up with the law, his group of volunteers produced only 33,849 signatures, or half of the required number.

Several weeks ago, Brian McNiff, spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin, said Belskis’ coalition seemed on track to gather the requisite 66,000 signatures. “At that point they were submitting a lot of signatures to cities and towns,” said McNiff, who didn’t know how many had been disqualified by municipal clerks before reaching Galvin’s office.

Signatures are disqualified if a paper has extraneous markings, if more than 25 percent of signatures come from one county or if a voter’s signature is not submitted in the town they live in, McNiff said.

“What was disconcerting was a couple weeks before the end period to submit them, the Secretary of State’s Office told us it appeared we had enough signatures,” Belskis said. “It turned out afterwards that was not so. They claimed they didn’t know where (the original statement) came from…so some of our members weren’t as motivated to work as hard…it was a relaxed effort I guess. If we had known we were that deficient, we would have worked harder over the last couple of weeks.”

The effort to get rid of the controversial law continues in the Legislature, where several lawmakers have filed bills to end or freeze 40B development. Belskis said he will continue to try and force change with 40B. “We gained an awful lot of memberships as result of the petition,” Belskis said. None of the bills saw action in 2007, the first half of the two-year legislative session.

Three petitions — a greyhound racing ban, a petition ending the 5.3 percent state income tax, and one to impose civil in lieu of criminal penalties for possession of less than one ounce of marijuana — met the signature requirement and are being sent to the Legislature for consideration. If the Legislature does not pass the measures by May, sponsors must collect an additional 11,000 signatures before their initiatives can appear as ballot questions in 2008.