SCARBOROUGH – A controversial town-wide leash law adopted by the Scarborough Town Council on Oct. 2 will go before voters, who get to decide by referendum if it will stand.

Town Clerk Tody Justice announced Monday evening that the advocacy group Dog Owners of Greater Scarborough (DOGS) was successful in its petition drive to put the controversial council decision before voters. Justice said via email that her office validated 2,493 of the 2,743 signatures submitted.

According to Scarborough’s town charter, petitioners needed a minimum of 2,379 valid signatures – 25 percent of the total residents who voted in the most recent gubernatorial election – to get their question on a special referendum ballot.

“We’ve had amazing conversations with people on all sides of the issue,” said lead petitioner Katy Foley of Lucky Lane. “It would seem the residents disagree with the council decision, as evidenced by the signatures we’ve collected in just 12 days.”

“I want to point out our disagreement with the council decision is not synonymous with disrespect,” said Foley. “We understand they have a difficult job to do, and this is a complex issue. This is not as simple as the love of our pets. It goes far deeper than that. What we did hear overwhelmingly from the residents of Scarborough is that they want to live in a town that practices tolerance, that practices compassion, that practices balance in every ordinance, for the best of all citizens, and that’s what we believe we had. We really want to go forward. Let’s share Scarborough.”

The Town Council will receive official certification of the petitions at its Nov. 6 meeting. From that point, the council has 30 days, to Dec. 6, to conduct a public hearing on the issue. The town charter then calls on the council to schedule a public vote within 30 days of the hearing, meaning the referendum can occur no later than Jan. 4, 2014.

DOGS members called a press conference on Oct. 16, just hours before the regular Town Council meeting, to “unleash” their petitions.

That effort could have gone by the wayside had the council approved a motion by Council Chairman Ron Ahlquist to reconsider the Oct. 2 update to the town’s animal control ordinance. The new rule institutes a year-round requirement that dogs be leashed when on any public property, including sidewalks, municipal beaches, athletic fields and wooded areas.

The lone exceptions made were for hunting dogs at work or when dogs are in specially “designated areas.” Although some councilors have called on the creation of as many as five dog parks in town, no such designated off-leash areas exist at this time.

As most Scarborough residents are by now aware, the new leash law stems from the killing of an endangered piping plover chick on July 15 on Pine Point Beach. Although the owner of the dog in question, King Street resident Rachel Speed, was never fined, the town itself was subjected to an investigation launched by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The service eventually levied a $12,000 fine against the town for violating the Endangered Species Act because, the feds say, the town “did knowingly cause” the killing by failing to institute a more stringent leash law during the plover nesting season.

At the time of the killing, dogs were allowed to run free on municipal beaches from sunrise until 9 a.m., from June 15 to Sept. 15. They were banned from the beach during those months from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and could be present from 5 p.m. until sunset only when on a leash. There were no leash restrictions in place from Sept. 16 to June 14.

An agreement with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, negotiated by Town Manager Tom Hall and approved by the council in a 5-2 vote at its Oct. 2 meeting, reduced the fine to just $500 in return for a number of concessions. Among these was adoption of a leash restriction on beaches at all times from April 1 to Aug. 31. However, in a surprise move, the council voted 5-2 to institute the all-encompassing, year-round leash law instead.

Saying he felt that decision “went too far,” Ahlquist called for reconsideration of the vote at the Oct. 16 council meeting. Because the petition drive was specific to the Oct. 2 vote, a move to reconsider and perhaps adopt a less restrictive leash law would have invalidated the signatures submitted to Justice earlier in the day. For that reason, many members of the DOGS group, wearing Scarborough red as a sign of solidarity, urged the council to vote against reconsideration and let the matter go before voters.

The Oct. 16 meeting was punctuated with some moments of levity, as when Mast Road resident Julie Hannon gave the council a physical demonstration of how a dog reacts upon discovering the terminal end of an 8-foot leash, which is another requirement of the Fish and Wildlife Service. An 8-foot leash is too short for many breeds, DOGS members said.

Hannon’s pantomime notwithstanding, the hour-long public comment session was otherwise among the most tense of the many meetings held since a stronger leash law came under consideration at the ordinance committee level in early August.

“Let’s dispense with this notion that this has anything to do with the plovers, because that’s intellectually insulting,” said Holmes Road resident Liam Somers, citing the fact that the recent killing was the only proven plover death in the jaws of a dog within the past decade.

“This is not now nor has it ever been anything other than a single-minded crusade by a select few to impose their will on the electorate,” said Somers. “The plover simply presented a convenient vehicle for that ball to start rolling.”

Sharman Kivatisky of Black Point Road, one of the comparatively few to speak publicly in favor of the new leash law, took the issue beyond plovers, as many proponents have, including ordinance committee chairman Richard Sullivan, who has acknowledged advancing the measure because dogs “are out of control in this town.”

“I’m not against dogs, but I think I speak for the rest of the Scarborough population who want to enjoy beaches and parks without concern or fear of being annoyed or indeed assaulted by dogs in our personal spaces,” said Kivatisky.

With Sullivan absent, the remaining members split 3-3 on reconsideration of the new leash law, which killed the question. Ahlquist said Sullivan was absent because he was moose hunting.

“There’s no way I’m going to support reconsideration on this,” said Councilor Kate St. Clair, who joined Jim Benedict and Ed Blaise to defeat Ahlquist’s motion.

“Do I think we pushed this through and rushed this? Yes. But I still feel in my gut it was the right thing to do,” she said.

St. Clair also chastised the crowd for the tone of its discourse, in private communication if not at public meetings.

“I’m embarrassed by some of the emails I’ve received in the last two weeks,” she said. “I would never, no matter what the situation was, treat someone the way we’ve been treated. Trust me. We would not be doing this if we did not love this town.”

Meanwhile, Councilor Judy Roy, who voted for reconsideration along with Ahlquist and Jessica Holbrook, said she was “totally, utterly embarrassed by how some councilors” have conducted their own behavior.

“I get positive statements from folks saying [reconsideration] ‘is probably something I can agree with,’ and then I can’t turn around and reach the knife in my back,” said Roy, adding that she wished she could remove her name from the November ballot. Roy is currently running for re-election in a four-way race for two open seats on the council.

“If I could pull my name today I would,” she said.

In an Oct. 20 email, Roy walked back that statement, saying it was borne of momentary of frustration, being “extremely disheartened” by the council vote. Roy had hoped to return the leash law to the ordinance committee, she said, in hopes of a rewrite and an agreement on increased enforcement that might accommodate all parties while avoiding at least the cost of a special election and maybe even a federal requirement for a full-time “piping plover coordinator.”

One resident at the Oct. 16 meeting called that job, to be funded by the town per the agreement with U.S. Fish and Wildlife for five years, “a really sweet babysitting job.”

Roy said she will continue her campaign for re-election, and vowed to make the plover issue a central point of her next term, if returned to her post.

“I am in the race and will do all that I can to support the people’s choice if they should succeed in overturning the motion,” she wrote. “I will advocate for an ad hoc committee to allow open dialogue to revamp the ordinance so that it is the best it can be for the most [people] and cost the taxpayers as a whole the least amount of money in the process. It also must satisfy the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whom I hope will be more compromising given the uniqueness of each of our beaches and the extremely small number of plovers who choose to nest on them.”

Fronted by Lucky Lane resident Katy Foley, members of advocacy group Dog Owners of Greater Scarborough gather outside Town Hall on Oct. 16 to deliver the signatures gathered over 14 days to send a recently adopted town-wide leash law to voters.