GF Community Awareness of FuFeng Project is seeking donations to help support our lawsuit against the city of Grand Forks to bring the building of a $700mil polluting Chinese corn mill project to a public vote. The money will be used for legal fees.

Statement on Behalf of People for the Vote

by Eckland & Blando LLP

Grand Forks grants its citizens broad power to bring measures to the ballot. Expressing legitimate and serious concerns about the FufengProject, which would have an immeasurable, decades-long impact on the community, citizens of Grand Forks rallied together by the thousands with a simple request: to put the Fufeng Project to a vote. These citizens met each and every requirement to allow the FufengProject to be placed on the ballot, yet the City Auditor, ignoring the citizens’ will, killed the petition.

Because of the City’s erroneous decision, concerned citizens were compelled to bring a lawsuit to require the City to do what it should have done in the first place: let them vote on the Fufeng Project. The lawsuit seeks to require the City Auditor to accept the valid petition signed by over 5,000 Grand Forks citizens, allowing them to have the final say on this controversial project at the ballot box.

Our court filings explain in detail the numerous and deep flaws in the City’s decision. Importantly, the City Auditor has no discretion to deny a valid petition – if it complies with the Grand Forks Home Rule Charter, then it must be accepted. Despite this, the City Auditor cited five grounds for rejecting the petition; each of these was legally wrong, many were unprecedented, and several had no basis in the Home Rule Charter or North Dakota Law.

• The City’s first claim was that the petition dealt with an “administrative matter” instead of a “legislative matter.” Yet in the past, the City has allowed votes on things as mundane as where to place a pool. But apparently the power given to the citizens to bring measures to the ballot ends when the multimillion-dollar Fufeng Project is at stake. Regardless, the Home Rule Charter says nothing about “administrative matters” and most astoundingly, the City ignored a clear North Dakota Supreme Court ruling that specifically rejected any“administrative/legislative” distinction.• The City next claimed the proposed ballot measure contained two distinct and unrelated questions. This conclusion is clearly absurd, based on a clear misapplication of the relevant law and a willful misreading of the petition’s content.• The City’s next ground, that the petition contained extraneous matter, also strains credulity. This requirement is nowhere to be found in the Home Rule Charter or the laws of North Dakota. Even if an “extraneous matter” requirement did exist, the City impermissibly interpreted the petition in such a way to create the alleged extraneous matter.• The City next alleged that the petition did not contain the “full text” of the resolution proposed, implying that the petitioners should have attached nearly 100 pages of contract documents to every petition. But the petition here very clearly embodied the “legislative will” of the measure, which satisfies the full text requirement. • Finally, in a last ditch effort to kill the petition, the City asserted that an affidavit and the names of the petition circulators should have been on every single page of each petition. Thissupposed “each page of the petition” requirement is nowhere to be found in the Home Rule Charter or even the inapt authorities the City cites.

In short, the City of Grand Forks has attempted to subvert the democratic will of its people by rejecting a valid petition. We look forward to correcting this injustice in Court.

People For the Vote - Grand Forks

By People for the Vote, LLC

People For the Vote - Grand Forks

Team Members