01/11/06: Mt. Horeb gathers anti-war signatures

Mt. Horeb gathers anti-war signatures

MOUNT HOREB - It was an emotionally and physically painful couple of days, pounding the pavement and knocking on doors. But Ken Scott thinks he collected enough signatures to make it possible for Mount Horeb residents to vote on a resolution in April on whether the United States should bring troops home from Iraq.

"My feet would ache, and I had to take Ibuprofen," Scott said of the five days he spent collecting the 350 signatures. "But it got to the point that I was grateful that I had limbs that could ache after seeing what my fellow Americans have gone through. It gets to be a very philosophical experience, collecting signatures."

Village Clerk/Treasurer Cheryl Sutter confirmed to The Capital Times that a petition had been turned in to her. Sutter explained that she has 10 days to confirm that the signatures all belong to voting age residents of the village. If the signatures are indeed valid, the petition will proceed to the Feb. 1 Village Board meeting. At that time the board could choose to pass the resolution itself, or the board could turn the resolution to a referendum for village residents on April 4.

Scott said he had been "beating himself up" over not having started a petition in Mount Horeb months ago when he saw Madison residents collecting signatures for a similar petition over the summer. Then, at a Southwest Wisconsin Area Progressives' meeting last month, Scott heard fellow Mount Horeb resident Steve Books tell the crowd he thought a petition for a referendum for troop withdrawal could work in Mount Horeb.

"I just had to join in," said Scott. "I knew I had no choice. You try to imagine the misfortunes that may have been avoided if communities had spoken up about the Vietnam War 10 years earlier than they did."

Books, Scott and others got started with a petition for a referendum question asking voters: "Should the United States begin an immediate withdrawal of all military personnel from Iraq now?"

By last Thursday the group had 50 of the 343 signatures required by state statutes for a citizen group to send a question to referendum.

But then they found out that Monona City Clerk Karen Eley declared an identical petition invalid in that community because it was in the form of a question rather than a statement. Eley told Monona's Bring Our Troops Home Coalition to change the wording, but on Tuesday night City Attorney Bill Cole declared that the change was a "substantive" one, and that a new petition would have to be circulated.

This left Books and his group in a quandary.

While a referendum has been written in the form of a question in some communities throughout Wisconsin, they didn't want to risk getting overruled like the group in Monona did.

Scott said it was a "painful" decision, but the Mount Horeb group chose to scrap its original petition and head back out to collect signatures on a new petition that read, "Resolved: The United States should begin an immediate withdrawal of all military personnel from Iraq now."

The group worked throughout the weekend and collected the last of the required signatures outside of a Plan Commission meeting Monday night.

If Sutter finds that not all of the 343 of the signatures are valid, she will send the petition back to Books and the other petitioners. At that point the time frame necessary to get the petition on the April 4 ballot will have passed, and the referendum will have to go on next November's ballot.

Published: January 11, 2006