A.G. Gancarski
A lawsuit challenging the city of Jacksonville’s 2016 pension referendum is a thing of the past, as the city was granted a motion for summary judgement on all seven counts Friday, while plaintiffs’ arguments were called “unconvincing.”
In his twelve-page ruling, it was clear that 4th Circuit Judge Donald Moran saw the filing as amateur hour.
Dismissing one count, Moran noted that “plaintiffs have conflated the city’s ability to call a referendum with its ability to levy a tax.”
The plaintiffs’ claim that one would need a graduate-level education to understand the ballot language — hilarious given that it got 65 percent of the vote — also was rejected, as the plaintiffs preferred to discuss the Fleisch-Kincaid reading test rather than relevant case law.
“There is no logical basis,” Moran wrote, for using that test to assess the readability of a ballot measure.
The claim that the referendum was invalid because the ballot measure was 78 words? Also laughed out of court for being absurd. As was the idea that city officials misrepresented the referendum.
