BATON ROUGE – The Registrar of Voters has started its full-time vetting process, counting and validating the signatures on the petition to create the new City of St. George.

The office had been going through a smaller, training phase where signatures were validated and processes were tweaked ahead of an all-out counting process. That extensive process is now underway, the Louisiana Attorney General’s office confirmed to WBRZ. It is handling commenting on the petition.

“The process is ongoing,” a spokesperson said. “The Registrar of Voters is working diligently through the process of validating petition signatures.”

There is no timetable for validating the signatures.

An attorney general decision last year advised there was no mandated deadline to validate the petition, though suggested a determination must be made within a reasonable amount of government time.

In a previous WBRZ report on the petition verification process, officials said counting the signatures will “take a while… [possibly] several months."

Organizers of the proposed city submitted a petition with more than 14,000 signatures to the registrar in October. Organizers believe they need about 13,000 to advance the proposal forward.

In 2015, the first petition got thrown out of court after the group fell 71 valid signatures short.

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