What happened in Plano, a town equipped with a foodie-centric Central Market and a reasonably vibrant restaurant community? "We weren't able to get into the grocery stores," says Brad Shanklin, president of the Plano Chamber of Commerce, who was spearheading the petition drive. "Central Market would not allow us in either." Shanklin said grocery stores, where he had hoped to get the lion's share of the necessary 20,077 signatures for each petition, froze him out. As a result, he estimates his collection came in a whopping 5,000 to 7,000 signatures shy of the necessary totals. Though he was able to put petition gatherers in Albertson's, Shanklin says Tom Thumb, the most robust grocer in Plano, and Central Market don't permit activities such as signature gathering on their premises because of unionizing concerns. This didn't thwart activists in Allen, who easily secured a 300-signature cushion over the 4,400 they needed for each measure by focusing on Kroger and Albertson's stores. "It makes me glad we hired a consultant," says Andre Dubois of Allen Citizens for Economic Growth, who says the consulting firm Texas Petition Strategies helped pave the way for a signature-gathering drive in that town's grocery stores. McKinney came in with more than 6,000 signatures for each ballot measure, significantly more than the 5,037 the city needed.
But all is not lost for Plano. Shanklin says that in the next go-around he will work from registered-voter lists and go door to door for signatures instead of parking gatherers in high-traffic businesses, a campaign that will begin in mid-August to qualify for a February 2005 ballot. But before that begins, Shanklin will have to fill his coffers. Of the $32,000 he collected for his latest signature-gathering exercise, only $3,500 remains. Apparently it costs a lot of money to go from a patchwork of dizzying gradations of wetness to just plain wet and dizzy.
