LEWISTON – Voters will be asked Tuesday to ratify new city rules that will allow door-to-door signature collecting to challenge council decisions.

“As long as it lets people have a say in budget issues, it’s a good change,” said David Hughes, a Lewiston resident who led a petition drive last year to challenge the city’s storm water utility. “The power over the purse is the power to govern, and if the voters don’t have that, they don’t have real power.”

Councilors in January approved new rules to let 10 registered voters take out a petition challenging council decisions and circulate the petitions around the city. They’d have 60 days to collect signatures and would have to collect roughly 1,200 signatures – 7 percent of the number of voters in the most recent gubernatorial election.

The rules need voter support to become valid.

Petitioners would be able to challenge any city decision, except for those involving city employment and current year budget issues. Any budget decisions overturned by voters take effect the following year, according to proposed changes.

“I think this is exactly what we’ve been after,” Hughes said. “It came out exactly the way it should have.”

Current rules require registered voters to come to City Hall to sign the petition, and City Administrator Jim Bennett said last July the rule conflict with the City Charter and state election rules.

The issue came to a head 2006, 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 2006 ballot, however.