NJ Supreme Court Ruling

The NJ Supreme Court recently upheld citizens right to the referendum provisions of the Faulkner Act, which allow citizens to put ordinances on the ballot for reversal when enough citizens object to the ordinances as passed.

Here’s an excerpt from an AP story on the ruling from Newsday:

The Trenton case stemmed from a restructuring of the Police Department approved by the City Council in 2004. Citizens objected, and they eventually obtained enough signatures to put the ordinance up for a vote. Mayor Douglas H. Palmer and the council opposed the referendum and persuaded a state Superior Court Judge Linda R. Feinberg to block the balloting.

Feinberg, relying on past rulings, found that the ordinance was administrative, not legislative, and not subject to recall. An appellate panel reversed that ruling. It noted that since other appellate panels disagreed on when ordinances were administrative or legislative, it was best to have a referendum since the state’s policy is to favor public participation.

The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling, but for a different reason. It found that since the state statute on referendums made no distinction between administrative and legislative ordinances, neither can the courts.

Judge Feinberg is the same judge who threw out a citizens’ initiative in Lawrence, briefly outlined in a previous post, which also includes information about a legislative effort to narrow citizen access to the initiative and referendum process our group is currently using for the Ordinance.