“Where’s our money? I worked really hard, and I want to be paid in full.”
By Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal
Petitioners who tried to get a hemp and marijuana referendum on Ohio’s November ballot are saying they either never got paid or only got partially paid for the signatures they collected.
Lisa Flagella and Amanda Ward say they—along with several other petitioners—did not get paid for the signatures they collected for the Ohio Senate Bill 56 referendum effort.
The referendum would have overturned the lawmaker-passed overhaul of the adult-use marijuana law passed by voters in 2023. Ultimately the referendum effort did not gather enough signatures to move forward within the necessary timeline for the ballot.
Thomas Miller and Pat Manning said they only got partially paid for the signatures they collected.
“We made the decision at one point in the campaign to suspend paid signature collection as we assessed how many signatures we had collected at that point because we did have a large grass roots movement of unpaid volunteers collecting signatures,” Dennis Williard, campaign spokesperson, said in an email.
Ohioans for Cannabis Choice had more than 5,000 people and businesses pledge to sign, collect, or host places where people could sign the petitions, Williard said.
If the referendum made it to the ballot, it would have given voters a chance to overturn a law that went into effect on March 20 that changes Ohio’s voter-passed recreational marijuana law and bans intoxicating hemp products, including THC-infused beverages.
Ohioans for Cannabis Choice would not say how many signatures were collected. They needed to collect 248,092 signatures and also needed to gather 3 percent of an individual county’s gubernatorial turnout in 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties to get on the November 3 ballot.
The S.B. 56 referendum collected about 208,000 signatures, said Mark Fashian, formerly the president of hemp product wholesaler Midwest Analytical Solutions in Delaware, Ohio.
Fashian, who said he helped raise money for the referendum effort, said the number of signatures while testifying during a May 4 injunction hearing of an ongoing lawsuit in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.
The new law reduces THC levels in adult-use marijuana extracts from a maximum of 90 percent down to a maximum of 70 percent, caps THC levels in adult-use flower to 35 percent, and prohibits smoking in most public places.
It also bans possessing marijuana in anything outside of its original packaging and criminalizes bringing legal marijuana from another state back to Ohio.
“I believed in the cause,” Flagella said.
Ohioans for Cannabis Choice hired Arno Petition Consultant as the lead consultant, a California-based firm run by Michael Arno—who hired Larry Laws of L&R Political Consultants to get petitioners to collect signatures.
The Ohio Capital Journal left messages and sent questions to Arno, but he did not respond.
Ohio Petitioning Partners, which is owned by Pam Lauter, was hired as a sub-contractor. Lauter said she has not been paid either.
“I’m infuriated,” Lauter said in an email. “This was the biggest debacle I have ever been involved with. I am in the same exact boat as everybody else is. I was not in control of this petition drive.”
She said her job was to hire people to collect signatures.
“The whole thing is shameful,” Lauter said in an email. “The whole thing is embarrassing. And my heart is broken over at [sic] all.”
Ohioans for Cannabis Choice didn’t pay people what they were supposed to be paid, claimed Laws, who has been involved in petition work for 30 years.
“I don’t think [Ohioans for Cannabis Choice] put out more than $100,000,” he said. “We took care of a lot of people as best we could, but certainly there wasn’t enough money there to take care of everything.”
Laws is not optimistic people will be paid.
“If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen,” he said.
The petitioners were reportedly told they would get paid $9 per valid signature.
Flagella collected 1,012 signatures for the S.B. 56 referendum in 10 days and has not gotten paid.
“Where’s our money?” she said. Flagella could have been paid about $9,000, depending on how many signatures were valid.
“I worked really hard, and I want to be paid in full,” she said. “I drove hours away from my house, spent ten hours on my feet, then drove another hour back to my house.”
Flagella, Miller, Manning and seven other people sent a demand letter for immediate payment to Lauter, Laws, Arno, and several other people involved in Ohioans for Cannabis Choice on March 27.
“This letter serves as a formal demand for the immediate payment of all outstanding wages owed to myself and 9 other petitioners for services rendered during the Ohio SB 56 referendum signature-gathering campaign… Professional petitioners were brought in from California and Florida as well as Ohio that were instructed to stop work and have subsequently been denied their earned pay.”
The Ohio Attorney General initially rejected the referendum’s summary language in January, but certified it February 3 after Ohioans for Cannabis Choice made changes to the language.
“That really limited our ability to get our signatures,” Fashian said.
Ohioans for Cannabis Choice stopped collecting signatures when the money ran out, Laws said.
“I was all for shutting it down when I seen that they were delaying [payments],” Laws said. “If I had it my way, I would have shut it down a week earlier.”
The paid petitioners were pulled off collecting signatures for the referendum on February 25, Flagella said, even though the deadline to collect signatures was March 19.
“We just got started,” Flagella said. “I was ready to pump it up.”
Pat Manning said he got paid for most of his signatures, but not all of them.
He collected about 1,000 signatures and he said he got paid about $7,000 from Ohio Petitions Partners.
“The first two weeks, everybody got paid,” he said. “The last [signature] turn in, nobody got anything.”
He turned in about 100 signatures during the last turn in, so he was expecting to be paid an additional $1,000, but he has not received any of that money.
“I’m still baffled as to what happened,” Manning said. “I’m very disappointed in the whole thing.”
He has been doing petition work for 10 years.
“It’s a ridiculous amount of money for the people that really know what they’re doing,” he said.
Flagella has been doing petition work for more than 20 years and said she’s “never been so burned.”
“I’ve never experienced anything like this before,” she said. “I’ve always gotten paid. I’ve always done an excellent job and I hold myself to very high standards and in the work that I do.”
Flagella remembers signing a contract, but has not been able to track it down. The other petitioners the Ohio Capital Journal talked to also said they are unable to access the contracts they signed.
“I signed the contract onboarding through this site, and the site is broken,” Flagella said. “I should be able to see my validity. I should be able to retrieve my contract that I signed.”
Thomas Miller—who has previously done marijuana petitions in Missouri and Florida—saw a Facebook post about getting involved with the S.B. 56 referendum.
“It’s great money when you get paid,” said Miller, who lives in Mansfield.
He collected 101 signatures in one day in eight degree temperatures in front of Beyond Hello Cannabis Dispensary in Mansfield to get the initial signatures needed to submit the initial proposal to the Ohio Attorney General.
He got paid $540 for those signatures, but he said he should have received $900.
“I know my signatures were good because I checked,” Miller said.
He then went on to collect an additional 311 signatures and estimated he should have been paid $2,800.
“I need my $2,800,” Miller said. “That’s why I got involved in this. It’s quick money, easy money.”
Amanda Ward collected about 100 signatures in 16 days and expected to be paid about $900.
“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “I felt like I put myself out there for nothing.”
Ward planned on using the money from collecting signatures to go take her family on a summer trip to Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
“I don’t see that happening,” she said. “It really sucks, but at this point, it’s not even necessarily about the money. It’s about that we were promised something and those conditions weren’t met. I know I’ll probably never see the money.”
This story was first published by Ohio Capital Journal.
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
