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Supporters will submit refinery petitions today
March 20, 2008

Sioux City Journal

By Michele Linck

Union County residents who support the proposed Hyperion Resources oil refinery said late Wednesday they have gathered all the signatures needed to put the matter to a countywide referendum. They plan to submit their petitions asking for a referendum to the Union County Auditor at 1 p.m. today.

"These signatures are being submitted at that time in order to ensure the referendum can appear on the June 3, 2008, primary vote," said J.B. Mercer, co-chairman of Citizens for Hyperion. "It it is expected there will be better voter turnout at the primary election, and this will also save the county money by not having a separate election for this vote."

Meanwhile, Ed Cable, spokesman for the opposition Save Union County Committee, said his group will begin circulating similar, if not identical, petitions today. He said they would already have a few signatures gathered at a meeting Wednesday night.

Mercer said Citizens for Hyperion had not only gathered the nearly 500 signatures required to force a referendum, but hundreds more. The group began canvassing with the petition on Friday.

Mercer said all the signatures they'll submit today appear on the third, corrected petition form. The group had collected some signatures on a form with a misspelled word and some on a second version that omitted the words "as passed by" in referring to the County Board of Commissioners' March 14 vote to approve a new zoning category for the project.

"We'll still be doing our drive," Cable said. "We'll wait and see and hopefully between theirs and ours, there will be more than enough to satisfy the law." The petitions are circulated only to ask whether the residents want to vote on the new zoning, not whether they are for or against it. That question will appear on the ballot.

The opposition group waited to begin canvassing out of concern that signatures gathered before legal notice of the zoning ordinance amendment allowing the refinery may not be counted. The legal notice was to have been published Wednesday and today in the county's four official newspapers.

However, Secretary of State Chris Nelson said the election laws allow the petitioning process to begin immediately after the ordinance receives final passage from the commissioners.

Hyperion Resources, a Dallas, Texas-based company, has proposed to build a $10 billion, 400,000-barrel-per day oil refinery on the recently rezoned 3,382 acres in southern Union County.