Redmond’s lawmakers are lawbreakers.

This week the Redmond Mayor and City Council went rogue.

Here’s the background: Last week, longtime Redmond activist Scott Harlan and his team of heroic volunteers turned in a record number of voter signatures for Redmond Initiative No. 1, which puts various limits on Redmond’s controversial automatic ticketing camera program (red-light cameras and ticketing speed cameras).

By law, they needed to collect 3,845 voter signatures and they found a whopping 6,050 Redmond voters eager to get this first-ever city initiative qualified for a public vote. Amazingly, that’s nearly half of active voters in Redmond. They met and exceeded the required threshold.

State law mandated that the city transfer those voter signatures to the County for verification.

The Mayor and City Council refused. Instead, after Tuesday’s City Council meeting, they held an executive meeting where the people and press were prohibited from attending. In a back room all by themselves, they plotted how to block your right to vote.

They came out of that secret meeting saying, without citing any statutory authority (because there isn’t any), that they are going to ignore the initiative. But no law allows them to do so. State law doesn’t grant veto power over initiatives to a city council.

The Mayor and City Council say they can ignore our initiative because they believe only the city council is allowed to decide policy on this subject.  But an initiative in my hometown of Mukilteo was voted on last November, despite efforts by the red-light camera company to stop it. The courts green-lighted the vote and it was overwhelming: 71 percent of Mukilteo voters rejected the ticketing cameras.

In Bellingham this year, a judge came to the same conclusion and allowed the initiative to be put to a vote. An appeals court agreed that the initiative should remain on the ballot, but thought the initiative’s topic was outside the scope of the initiative power, and so the vote will be advisory. Their decision is being appealed to the state Supreme Court and they will decide whether the people’s vote is binding or advisory.

But none of the judges prevented the vote – which is what Redmond’s Mayor and City Council are trying to do. The reason the Bellingham initiative (and the Mukilteo initiative before it) went to a public vote is because city officials followed state law, turned over the petitions, and the county auditor was given the opportunity to verify the signatures. Redmond’s Mayor and City Council are preventing the auditor from verifying signatures by refusing to turn them over as state law requires.

There’s simply no excuse for city officials to take away the people’s right to vote. They are elected to represent the people, not rule over them. I firmly believe their obstruction is intended to not only protect their ticketing camera profits, but to deter Redmond’s citizens from utilizing the initiative process in the future.

And that’s just not right.

What’s especially hypocritical is that the Mayor and City Council claim they support the ticketing cameras because, they always say: “We just want citizens to follow the law.”

But here they are blatantly violating state law concerning citizen initiatives. You and I get $124 tickets for violating the laws, but they get to use the superior resources of government – our tax dollars – to protect themselves from any penalty for their illegal actions.

On behalf of the 6,050 Redmond citizens who signed petitions, Scott will initiate a lawsuit to force the city to follow the law (please contact Scott and help him any way you can at s.harlan@comcast.net or (425)-896-8276.

It’s infuriating. They’ve forced Redmond citizens to sue their own city government in order to secure rights that are supposed to be guaranteed. When push-came-to-shove, the Mayor and City Council sided with an out-of-state, for-profit red-light camera company rather than the citizens who elected them.

In 15 years of doing citizen initiatives, I’ve never seen anything like it.

This is no longer about ticketing cameras in Redmond – it is about the people’s fundamental right to initiative, their right to petition their government guaranteed by the First Amendment, their right to participate and vote and be heard. It is about whether the citizens of Redmond are going to let the Mayor and City Council get away with flagrantly violating the law.

If the people don’t fight to protect Redmond Initiative #1, the Mayor and City Council will assume everyone is OK with their betrayal. And that would be a tragedy.

After Scott’s initiative was announced, Mayor John Marchione called it a “temper tantrum.”  I wouldn’t characterize Redmond citizens exercising their right to petition their government as childish.

Would you?

Tim Eyman served as a mentor and coach to Scott Harlan and his volunteers on Redmond Initiative No. 1. He can be contacted at (425)-493-9127, tim_eyman@comcast.net or www.Voters-Decide.org.