Opinion ID: 1810128
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Risk of an erroneous deprivation; probable value of added procedural safeguards.

Text: As the Board points out, there is little risk an erroneous deprivation of the private interest will result from the petition process. The record shows that Bowers came very close to obtaining the required number of signatures. In fact, Bowers believed that he had met the requirement when he presented the signatures to the auditor on August 6. He was approximately 600 signatures away from the statutory requirement on that date, meaning that he had collected approximately ninety-six percent of the required signatures over a seven-day period from July 31 to August 6. Bowers admitted he would have had the required amount if he had one more day. The record also shows that Bowers began planning a petition drive on July 27, the day after notice was published, but he did not actively begin the petition process until a few days afterwards. If Bowers had taken full advantage of the amount of time given by the Boardapproximately eleven dayshe may very well have been successful. As the district court noted, Bowers ignores his own mistakes in failing to submit the required number of signatures, detailed in his stipulated testimony, and blames the statutory requirements instead. In addition, the recent success of Scott County voters, as previously discussed, demonstrates the statutory scheme is not unfair as Bowers suggests. That success illustrates the statutory bar has not been set so high by the Iowa legislature that it effectively eliminates all elections on bonds like the ones here. The probable value of additional or substitute procedural safeguards is slight at best. Bowers's near miss, due to his own miscalculations, and the Scott County experience strongly suggest that the probable value of increasing the time for gathering the signatures and lowering the percentage requirement is not significant. In balancing the foregoing three interests, we believe the scales tip in favor of finding no procedural due process violation. The district court correctly concluded that the referendum statutes provide all the process that is constitutionally due to Bowers.