A petition to alter Douglas County’s vacation home rental ordinance to ban rentals in residential zoning and allow them in neighborhood commercial zoning has been denied by the Douglas County Clerk-Treasurer’s Office.

The Clerk’s Office — practicing standard petition-verification protocols pursuant to Nevada Revised Statute (NRS) 295.270 — found 124 address discrepancies, 127 instances of no circulator affidavit, and 231 signatures not matching, among other discrepancies, totaling 574 rejected signatures, according to a press release from the county.

Consistent with NRS 295.260, the Clerk’s Office selected a random sample of 500 signatures for verification.

The random sample was selected by numbering each of the 109 documents and then drawing numbers 1-109 corresponding to the document number until the threshold of 500 signatures was reached.

Next, the Clerk examined the 500 signatures for verification. The random sample showed the number of valid signatures was 90 percent or more, and less than 100 percent of the 500 samples. Therefore, as required by NRS 295.260(2)(a), the Clerk’s Office continued the verification of the remaining documents.

“My office has followed standard verification processes as required by Nevada law, and found discrepancies in the data,” said Douglas County Clerk-Treasurer Amy Burgans. “I place the utmost importance on a fair and equitable democratic process, and will follow protocols to ensure that petition verification is accurate and lawful.”

In the Certification of Petition Insufficiency, Burgans determined that, “Pursuant to NRS 295.260, I caused to be conducted an examination of the signatures affixed, and determined that 4,277 of those signatures were valid signatures of registered voters in Douglas County by examining the registration records on file in my office; and from the examination I have determined the following results:

TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES SUBMITTED 4,852
TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES REMOVED PER REQUEST OF SIGNATORY 1
TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES EXAMINED 4,851
TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES REJECTED 574
TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ACCEPTED 4,277
TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNATURES REQUIRED 4,389

“During the course of the verification process, it was determined four of the documents lacked a circulator’s affidavit,” Burgans said. “In this instance, one document was missing the jurat language, one document was missing the notary public stamp and two of the documents were missing the signature of the notary. Due to a lack of a circulator’s affidavit, the four documents do not comply with the requirements of Nevada’s Constitution Article 19 §3 and thus none of the associated signatures on the four documents can be verified as genuine.”

More information on County petitions can be found here.

Petition organizer Jeanne Shizuru filed to gather signatures for the petition at the end of August.

Organizers said at the end of January that they were confident they have more than the required 4,389 signatures required to get the ordinance on the ballot.