The Long Beach City Clerk’s office has verified a random sample of the signatures submitted for a proposed local ballot initiative aimed at creating safety protections and workload restrictions for hotel workers. The Los Angeles County Clerk’s office will complete the rest of the verification process, with a deadline of August 16.

 

According to City Clerk Analyst Pablo Rubio, the first step in the process is verifying a random sample of 3% of the signatures. This means ensuring that the signatures are from Long Beach registered voters. Rubio said that if, based on the sample, 110% of the signatures are projected as valid, a proposal would go straight to the November ballot. If the projected range falls between 95% and 110%, a full verification process is conducted, and if it records less than 95%, the proposed measure would fail.

 

At 107%, Rubio said the proposed Hotel Workplace Requirements and Restrictions ordinance requires a full verification of the 46,084 signatures submitted May 22 by the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community. “Since we don’t have enough staff to verify the remaining 45,000 signatures, we handed it over to L.A. County,” Rubio said. The measure requires 27,462 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.

 

The ordinance would require that hotels with 50 or more rooms provide employees who work in guest rooms alone with panic buttons. It would also limit the amount of space a worker is allowed to clean in an eight-hour workday and bans hotels from assigning more than two hours of overtime in a day without written consent. However, a unionized hotel may receive an exemption.

 

Last year, a similar proposal failed in the Long Beach City Council by a slim margin. Councilmembers who voted against it were Suzie Price, Al Austin, Stacy Mungo, Dee Andrews and Daryl Supernaw. The Long Beach Hospitality Alliance also opposed the proposal as well as the proposed ordinance.