The Culinary Union, one of Nevada’s most prominent workers’ organizations, has backed off of its fight to get a rent control measure on the November ballot for North Las Vegas after missing the cutoff for printing election materials.
The union had been campaigning for a measure that would have tied rent hikes to the city’s consumer price index (CPI), with the stipulation that increases could not surpass 5 percent year-over-year.
However, the North Las Vegas City Council rejected the measure for two reasons—a discrepancy related to the number of required signatures as well as unauthorized changes to the language of the measure that rendered it invalid.
Culinary officials were under the impression that they needed signatures from 15 percent of the votes cast in the city’s general election in 2019, which they met and exceeded. But due to the fact that the signatures were presented after the June primary, officials said that the total needed to correspond to that election instead, and by that turnout, the measure was short by over 1,000 signatures.
The union initially indicated that it would challenge the council’s decision in court, but has since backed off from that stance, saying that it isn’t worth the headache of extended legal proceedings.
In a statement, Culinary officials said that the organization “won’t be deterred, nor will we waste time in court. We will continue running the largest political field program ever in Nevada to elect candidates who will center workers.”
Culinary’s Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge called the ruling “unfortunate,” and told the Nevada Independent that rent stabilization “is a solution that needs to be enacted and can be enacted right now, and Democrats need to come out swinging.”
