Referendum Petitions Continue Despite New Hurdles

There are several updates to the zoning referendum, including sufficiency, new legal challenges, and the city staff writing new campaign finance law.

Zoning petition #3 has passed the count for initial sufficiency. Petition #3 was to repeal Ordinance O-2025-29, which concerned Article 3 of the zoning code. Article 3 describes zoning districts. Petition #3 will join #1 and #2 in waiting for final approval before going to City Council.

Zoning Petition #4 has been submitted to Lakewood. That completes the signature gathering process to repeal all parts of the newly passed zoning code.

There are rumors that all petition signatures have been challenged and will require a new hearing and costly legal defense. Details pending.

Campaign Finance Challenge

The first legal challenge was made by Kip Kolkmeier, claiming campaign finance violations.

The hearing for the violations was held November 20, 2025. At base, Kolkmeier argued that the intent of the law was to be applied to referendums, even though referendums were never discussed. He contends that reading the law requires using the special legal definitions for that section without using definitions from other sections. He claims that City Council intended to include referendums when they were talking about initiatives because sometimes council also used the catchall term “ballot question.”

Getting down to definitions per section is legal hair-splitting. Kolkmeier is an attorney who had a career writing state legislation, so this argument is right up his alley. But grassroots people, and even City Councilors, are generally not crafting this kind of nuanced wording during a public meeting, even with the aid of city attorneys.

At the time of the campaign finance meetings, the highly successful Strategic Growth Initiative was still irritating to many on City Council who didn’t agree with it. Many Council Members and staff were eager to find barriers to more citizen-led initiatives. Referendums were not a concern, and that could be why they were not mentioned at all. Kolkmeier contends they are all the same for this discussion. 

Kolkmeier asked the hearing officer to watch twenty minutes of a past campaign finance meeting wherein they talk about initiatives and ballot questions but not referendums. The hearing officer serves the purpose of a judge in these proceedings. The hearing officer declined to watch the video during the live proceedings but promised to watch later. Kolkmeier said he would have brought former City Councilor Rebekah Stewart in to verify her unsaid intent from the discussion a year ago if that was necessary. 

Arguing the complaint or arguing the ambiguity of the law

The hearing itself showed parties arguing completely different cases. The hearing officer stated that she was hired to decide on whether the campaign finance law was ambiguous, as ruled by the City Clerk. She said the issue was whether the referendum required a campaign finance committee BEFORE collecting signatures.

Kolkmeier argued that he was there to present evidence that his claim was valid and should be prosecuted.

The defendants were John Frogge and Karen Miller, who started the referendum. They had outside legal counsel, Suzanne Taheri, who pointed out that although their name was on the complaint, the matter to be decided was about the ambiguity of the city law and so had nothing really to do with them personally. Their position largely agreed with the hearing officers’ understanding.

Kolkmeier couldn’t seem to understand the limited scope of the hearing (as seen in this video summary). Because he continued to discuss campaign finance violations, defense responded with the following points:

1. Lakewood already ruled that since the law did not mention “referendums”, they did not expect the referendum group to have campaign financing until after it was determined there was a ballot question.
2. If the law should be applied to referendums, they should have an opportunity to cure, which they did not get
3. The city did not make it possible to set up a campaign finance committee because of the city’s interpretation years ago that it was not needed
4. The referendum defendants tried to register for a committee and were therefore “substantially compliant”
5. The defendants would have appreciated the opportunity to make a finance committee because it would have made taking donations easier
6. Referendums and initiatives are substantially different in many ways, one of which is that referendums have a much shorter timeline

City Will Amend Law

The hearing started with a new opinion offered by the attorney for Lakewood, Gus Schencks. He said that the city has decided the law was not what was intended and that they will get City Council to fix it soon.

This statement is an indication of how Lakewood really works, when the attorneys can tell everyone that they know Council meant something other than what is written. Furthermore, they can say that the law means something different than what the city interpreted the council’s law to mean when it was fresh.

We know how Lakewood originally interpreted the law because shortly after the new campaign financing law for initiatives was passed, Lakewood contracted the development of a new online reporting system for campaign finance. Because the new law did not include referendums, which was understood at the time, no online campaign finance reporting system was developed for referendums. Now Lakewood is rewriting history via the city attorney’s opinion, shown in the video here. Lakewood staff also seems to promise a positive vote on the new interpretation.