Initiative on renaming skids to a halt

You could say they missed it by a mile. Or, maybe more accurately, 10 miles — the length of the recently renamed Randy Papé Beltline.

But given what Eugene resident Kevin Prociw and Springfield resident Scott Reynolds were up against, that’s not surprising, said Don Hamilton, spokesman for the Oregon Secretary of State’s office.

“It’s a huge hill to climb, what they were trying to do,” Hamilton said.

The pair were opposed to the state highway name change made in April. Their signature-collecting effort to place a measure on Oregon’s November ballot requiring a statewide vote to name any highway facility fell far short Friday. About 81,652 signatures short.

They needed to collect 82,769 signatures (the amount needed for a statutory change in Oregon) in two days, but only came up with 1,117, Reynolds said. They had until 5 p.m. Friday to collect the signatures, a process they were able to start only Thursday, and get them to the Election Division of the Secretary of State’s office in Salem.

“They made it up here,” Hamilton said. “But they could not attest that they had a significant amount of signatures.”

The Secretary of State’s Office has until Aug. 1 to count and verify ballot title signatures, but if petitioners cannot attest they have the “bare minimum” necessary, they are not accepted, Hamilton said.

Instead, Reynolds said he and Prociw took the signatures to Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s office along with a letter they wrote to the governor. But the governor was not in, so they left the items with an aide, Reynolds said.

“What I learned is that 1,117 people went out of their way in a day and a half to publicly support us. And only 16 people publicly supported (the renaming of Belt Line Road),” Reynolds said, referring to the five members of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy and the seven members of the Eugene City Council, Papé family spokesman Tim Clevenger and one other person whose named escaped him.

Piercy and the City Council actually wrote a letter endorsing Belt Line Road being renamed for Papé, the late Eugene businessman and former transportation commission member, before the OTC’s initial vote in March. It was also before Piercy and the council knew the original proposal would cost taxpayers at least $250,000, maybe more, to replace about 50 highway signs with the ones holding the new name.

That decision, after the OTC asked Kulongoski to make the name-change request so it could supersede its own highway naming guidelines, resulted in a public backlash and cries of a secretive process in Lane County.

The OTC then came up with a watered-down proposal, which it approved in early May, to still rename Belt Line Road for Papé but initially install just two small signs with his name at each end of the highway at a cost of $1,500. Those signs were installed June 9.

Reynolds and Prociw could not start gathering signatures until Thursday because the state did not adopt a ballot title for their proposed measure until June 16, which was followed by a two-week period to allow for appeals, Hamilton said. If passed, the proposed measure also would have rescinded any renamed state highway facilities made since Jan. 1, 2010.

The state’s initiative filing process for the November 2010 election began in August 2009. Prociw and Reynolds filed their petition on April 8 and initially had to gather the requisite 1,000 signatures for the state to create the ballot title.

Faced with little time to collect the 82,769 signatures to get the measure on the ballot, Prociw and Reynolds resorted to the Internet, pleading with citizens to print out signature forms online Thursday and Friday, sign them, and take them to drop boxes throughout the state.