Grover Beach group wants a building height measure on ballot. Does it have time?
A misunderstood deadline in Grover Beach shortened the window to collect enough signatures to put a measure limiting building heights on this year’s ballot.
But is it the petitioner’s fault, or the city’s or something else entirely?
On Feb. 11, a group of citizens who later organized under the “Save Grover Beach” banner submitted a notice of intent to circulate a petition for a November ballot measure that would limit building heights in the city to 40 feet.
That kicked off a 180-day window for the petitioners to collect 793 signatures to qualify their measure — but which ballot — and in which year — is now in question.
Proponents of the initiative were under the impression that they would have until Aug. 7 to collect and submit the signatures for certification by the city clerk, and in the past week, several took to social media with the claim that the city had moved the goal posts for the submission deadline.
“We know that Grover voters will keep contacting us and responding with their signatures,” proponent Kelvin Coveduck said in an email to The Tribune. “However, due to the city moving the goal post on the deadline for signatures, people need to understand that they need to sign within the next couple of weeks if they want to see this measure on the November ballot.”
But Mayor Kassi Dee said the April 22 deadline to submit signatures to the city was always the case, and may have been misunderstood by the proponents.
“Aug. 7 is the deadline for a city to submit all information for a November 2026 ballot measure to the county elections office,” Dee said. “It’s not the deadline to submit signatures for the initiative.”
The Tribune looked into the question as part of its Reality Check series.
What does the ballot measure process require?
Dee said proponents of the initiative may have been misled by a date published in KSBY’s coverage of the initiative, which stated that “793 signatures need to be verified by the county elections department by Aug. 7.”
But that date does not account for the various “trigger” steps in the process if the proponents want their measure on this year’s ballot, she said.
“We have a recommended deadline,” Dee said. “It’s not a set-in-stone deadline. This is just the recommended deadline that ensures that the city and the county have enough time to validate the signatures, to see if the signatures qualify, to then bring it to the council.”
Those steps are necessary before a measure can qualify for the ballot.
Dee said state law allows the city up to 30 business days to verify submitted signatures before the City Council can approve the signatures at a regular meeting.
Meanwhile, the county has its own June 16 deadline to verify signatures for any measures going on the November ballot, and the city’s last regular meeting before then falls on June 8, with an agenda that needs to be finalized and published on June 4.
“The city conveyed this to the initiative proponents, that backing up from this 30-(business) day review period would lead to April 22 as a target date for proponents to submit signatures for the November 2026 ballot,” Dee said. “Proponents can submit signatures after this date, but it would just be difficult for the city to review the signatures in time, given the extent of the review, and, of course, working with the county elections office, because they are also going through a lot of qualifying signatures because of other initiatives that are happening currently.”
In short, if the petition gains enough signatures but not in time to be verified by the June 4 agenda review time, then the measure would fall to the next election in November 2028, Dee said.
Dee said the city met with the proponents on March 30, the day before a joint Grover Beach City Council and Planning Commission meeting on the future of building height rules.
During the meeting, the city warned the petitioners of the April deadline and informed them that the petition would still be good for the following election if enough valid signatures were collected.
“If they wanted to put this on the 2028 ballot, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because the process would have been very clear that they have 180 days,” Dee said. “Because we’re so close to the election, there are other circumstances, other deadlines that we have to take into account, including the county’s deadline of June 16.”
Proponents: City ‘moving the goal post’
Still, proponents of the ballot measure said they felt blindsided by the April 22 submission deadline, which was just over three weeks from time they learned of it.
Coveduck, one of the proponents who submitted the petition, said state law gives citizen ballot initiatives until May 30 to get a measure on the November ballot, “as it did in 2024 with our last two successful measures.“
He said proponents calculated a May 30 deadline for signature submissions based on Article 2, Sections 11 and 13(b) of the California Constitution and California Election Code Chapter 3, which concerns municipal elections.
Coveduck said while his initial reaction was that the city was being “a little surreptitious” when they met with the proponents on March 30, the council’s actions the following day at the joint City Council and Planning Commission meeting showed that the city isn’t actively working to block the petition from being submitted for this year’s ballot.
“They took a vote on whether to go ahead and spend the time to analyze how (the measure) could affect future (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) numbers and so forth, and if the City Council had not voted for that and waited for the petition to be submitted and approved, then we wouldn’t have made the November ballot,” Coveduck said. “They are working with us to some extent, because if the City Council had not done that, then there’s no way we would have had enough time to make the ballot in November.”
Coveduck said the group intends to collect 1,000 signatures to make sure it meets the requirement of 793 valid signatures by the April 22 deadline and is already roughly three-quarters of the way to its 1,000-signature goal.
“When you know you have a shorter deadline, you work harder, right?” he said. “I don’t know when they knew, I can only tell you when they told us, and that was like a week ago, which was a big shock to everyone that’s involved in the petition.”
