After taking some flack for uploading a photo to Facebook depicting what appears to be a deceptive marketing practice to gather referendum signatures I took a road trip to visit the petition gatherers and hear what they had to say.

The two I met were from Sacramento and hired by a Sacramento company called American Petition Consultants.

The guys are paid a buck each for signatures on two state measures and $2 a pop for the marijuana ordinance referendum.

The referendum effort is being sponsored by the newly formed “Community Alliance to Ban Illegal Cannabis Cultivation.”

The group includes some of the folks who were involved in last year's failed Measure D marijuana initiative.

The name “Community Alliance to Ban Illegal Cannabis Cultivation” raises the question, how can you ban something that's already illegal?

I met with one signature gatherer who was working the door at Walmart; the other had set up shop outside of Safeway in Lakeport.

The Safeway guy said he's collecting around 300 to 500 signatures a day on three petitions combined, so he's making a pretty decent wage. I imagine there are plenty of local folk who would leap at the opportunity to make that kind of money.

Unfortunately, both were utterly uninformed about the new county ordinance; one admitted that he didn't know the specifics while the other explained that I could have six plants on an acre and 24 on 20 acres. Neither seemed aware of the option to grow indoors.

The guy who admitted he didn't really know much about it explained that the referendum was to protect mom and pop businesses from corporate takeover. He said this was to let the voters decide. So I asked him if he'd ever heard of our Measure D. Nope.

Measure D was a grower-sponsored initiative put to the voters in June 2012. It went down to defeat by a two-to-one margin.

All in all, the petition gatherers were very pleasant, though totally ill informed about the place where they are working.

While I was kicking it with one of the guys, a couple signing the petition explained to me that part of the ordinance was to charge fees for plants and require “RFID” – radio frequency identification – tags so officials could drive through neighborhoods and check on compliance with some kind of radio receiver.

In addition to that paranoid departure from reality they also apparently thought Measure D won and had been altered by the Board of Supervisors after passing. I asked if they paid attention to local news and both those local people said no.

To satisfy my curiosity I'd looked up the petition for the advertised children's hospital funding on the Secretary of State website and learned that's not what the ballot measure really is.

The fabled “Children’s Hospital” ballot initiative is actually an initiative to change legislative rules to require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature when they want to amend existing laws that impose fees on hospitals. It also directs the fees collected to pay hospitals for uncompensated care for the uninsured of any age, even children.

To my surprise the text of the initiative has no Children’s Hospitals mentioned at all. Nice try, but no cigar.

The third petition being offered for signature is to require drug and alcohol testing for doctors and for those test results to be reported to the California Medical Board. Positive tests would require suspension of the doctor and disciplinary action if the doctor was impaired while on duty.

John Jensen is co-founder of Lake County News. He lives in Lucerne, Calif.