LEWISTON – Voters won’t see a measure to revise the city’s petition-signature rules on this November’s ballot.

Councilors couldn’t agree on a proposed ordinance that would let people seeking to overturn council decisions take petitions out of City Hall to collect signatures. With two councilors absent from Tuesday’s meeting, members voted 3-2 to send the matter to voters. While technically passing, it needed four votes to be approved.

City Administrator Jim Bennett said he plans to bring the issue up this winter, after a new City Council is seated.

“We’ll have to deal with it in one way or another, either with the council or with the courts,” he said.

The issue came to a head last year, after the city adopted a storm water utility fee to pay for culvert maintenance, street-sweeping and storm sewer-line projects. A group of 10 residents started a petition seeking to overturn the fee. The group failed to gather enough signatures to put the storm fee on the November ballot, however.

City ordinances require petitioners to gather 1,000 signatures to put a question on the ballot. According to ordinances, that petition is kept at the City Clerk’s Office. People who want to sign the petition had to come to the window and ask for it.

Those ordinances conflict with both the City Charter and state law, according to Bennett. Challengers should be allowed to take the petitions out of City Hall.

The proposed changes would have let petitioners go door-to-door to gather signatures. They would have had to gather about 1,862 signatures – 15 percent of the number of Lewiston residents that voted in the last governor’s race – to get something on the ballot.

As written, it would have let voters challenge any council decision, unless it related to budgets or personnel. That’s where councilor consensus broke down.

Councilor Stavros Mendros argued that voters should be allowed to challenge any decision councilors made any time they wanted. Councilor Mark Paradis argued that a wide open people’s veto would slow down city business to a crawl.

That didn’t sound like a bad idea to Suzanne Roy of 3 Sandy Lane.

“Fast government is dangerous government,” she said. “The best government is slow, and deliberative. And if it causes a problem, that’s what you are elected to deal with.”