The city of Edinburg is now ordered to accept a petition that calls for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage for city staff and contractors to $15 per hour.
This comes after a federal judge sided with the nonprofit organization that filed the petition last year and then sued the city for rejecting it.
U.S. District Judge Randy Crane ruled in favor of Ground Game Texas on Thursday, finding that two of the city’s requirements for circulating a petition — which were the basis for the city rejecting Ground Game’s petition — were unconstitutional.
“The District Court ruling today is a major victory for Ground Game Texas, Edinburg city employees and contractors, and all residents of Edinburg,” Mike Siegel, general counsel for Ground Game Texas, said in a statement. “For too long, workers in the Rio Grande Valley have earned wages far below the national average, including many of the public servants who provide for their communities every day.
“The people of Edinburg will soon have the opportunity to guarantee a living wage for their city workers, which will help improve the standard of living for all workers in the RGV.”
Ground Game Texas, an organization that pushes progressive initiatives in various cities throughout the state, worked with LUPE Votes to collect signatures for a petition to raise the minimum wage for city employees and contractors to $15 an hour.
But after it submitted the petition to the city, Edinburg City Secretary Clarice Y. Balderas rejected it, telling the city council that the petition did not meet requirements set in the city charter.
Those requirements mandated that the people circulating the petition to collect resident signatures had to be registered to vote in the city of Edinburg and had to be part of a five-member committee that had been formed for purposes of circulating the petition.
For this petition, though, Ground Game hired two field organizers who were not Edinburg voters to collect signatures.
Ground Game argued in their lawsuit, which was filed in June, that the requirement that the petition circulators be Edinburg voters was unconstitutional as it violated the organization’s First Amendment rights.
In his order, the judge stated the central issue was whether the city’s petition committee system for the circulation of petitions is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Currently, the city requires that circulating petitions be limited to five individuals and that all of those five people be registered voters.
Crane found that the city’s requirement that limits the circulation of petitions to just five people and the requirement that those five people be registered voters were both unconstitutional.
The order noted the city also alleged that their charter requires those individuals to be residents of the city. However, the judge found no textual support in the charter for that residency requirement and therefore did not address its constitutionality.
Attorneys for the city had previously argued that they also could not accept the petition because it was an “appropriation ordinance” in that it would require the city to establish a wage floor of $15 per hour for city employees and contractors and would require the city to incorporate that wage floor into their annual budget.
However, the judge disagreed. Crane wrote that the city could reject charters calling the city to spend $5 million each year on parks, for example.
But an ordinance raising the minimum wage of park employees is not a mandate for a minimum amount of money that the city should spend “given that the City remains in control over the number of park employees it retains.”
Following the reasoning stated in a previous order, the judge determined that “‘appropriation ordinance’ requires some specific allocation of money, rather than any policy changes that may have the effect of requiring the city to adjust its budget,” the order stated.
Crane ordered the city to no longer enforce its policy of limiting who can circulate an initiative petition and ordered the city secretary to accept Ground Game’s petition.
When such petitions are accepted, the city council will have to vote on whether to adopt the ordinance to raise the minimum wage or not.
If the city council does not adopt the ordinance, Ground Game can still force an election on the initiative by submitting another petition with signatures that equal at least 5% of the people who voted in the last regular city election. Those people must also be different from those who signed the first petition.
When they first submitted the petition to the city in April last year, Ground Game had already collected enough signatures to place the initiative on the ballot.
