Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Farmers Branch officials will have 15 days to verify whether a group gathered enough signatures to force the City Council to repeal an ordinance adopted last month banning apartment managers from leasing to illegal immigrants or to call a special election on the issue.

Leaders of the political action committee Let the Voters Decide turned in petitions with more than 1,200 signatures just before Wednesday's 6 p.m. deadline. They needed 721 valid signatures.

"We blew the roof off," said William Brewer, a partner in the Bickel & Brewer law firm.

The firm's community service arm, Bickel & Brewer Storefront, is leading the petition drive and is representing resident Guillermo Ramos, who has sued the city, saying officials violated state open-meetings laws by debating the ordinance behind closed doors before voting on it.

If the signatures are certified, the city must repeal the ordinance or call an election to decide the matter. City officials have said that election would be on May 12, the day City Council elections will be held.

"Hopefully it will be a huge opportunity not only for people to understand better what the people are really feeling like up in Farmers Branch," Mr. Brewer said, "but it will certainly kick off a debate about this particular ordinance that will come under scrutiny and, frankly, maybe a broader debate."

The rental ordinance, along with a resolution making English the city's official language and a vote to allow one of the city's police officers to participate in a federal program that trains officers to act as immigration officers, has made the city a hot spot in Texas for the debate over illegal immigration.

Supporters of the ordinance said they plan to obtain copies of the petition and scrutinize them for irregularities. They have accused volunteers with Let the Voters Decide of misrepresenting the petition drive's purpose and intimidating voters to sign.

"We believe the residents can scour this thing and look through it and crunch it, and if we see things that don't look or smell right, we can point them out to the city," said Tom Bohmier, one of the organizers of www.supportfarmersbranch.com.
"Obviously the city has to make the determining factor of whether the signatures are valid. If we show them questionable ones ... we're doing our jobs as citizens to promote the democratic process."

Among the things the ordinance's supporters will be looking for are duplicate names, an excessive number of voters at an address and identical signature patterns that may indicate people who signed not only for themselves but for a family member or someone else.

Mr. Brewer and volunteers have said they have operated completely aboveboard and have carefully scrutinized the information themselves to make sure the signatures belong to registered voters.

City Secretary Cindee Peters said she will compare each name and address on the petitions with Dallas County's list of registered voters, up to the required 721.
But 31 of the signatures will already be thrown out. That's the number of people who by midafternoon Wednesday had filed affidavits with the city asking that their signatures be removed from the petition.