An effort to repeal Issaquah’s ban on plastic bags has gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters.

A letter dated Oct. 3 from the King County department of elections, sent to the Issaquah city clerk, confirmed that a group called Save Our Choice, had gathered enough valid signatures to send a repeal of the use of plastic bags to a vote.

The group was required to gather 2,549 signatures. It was successful in rounding up 2,597 names.

The 2,549 number represents 15 percent of registered voters in Issaquah as of Nov. 2011.

Save Our Choice submitted 3,687 signatures August 30 but only 2,197 of those were ruled valid.

District 5 state Sen. Mark Mullet, who sponsored the bag ban while he was still on the Issaquah City Council, said it will be up to voters to uphold the ban or repeal it.

“The organization is not from Issaquah,” Mullet said. “They tried this in Seattle and it didn’t work, so now they are putting all of their energy into a smaller city hoping to overturn it.”

Mullet said the industry that makes plastic bags is working to make sure these ordinances fail and that they are not looking at the long-term environmental impact.

If every city in the state separately bans plastic bags Mullet said, it would be confusing to business owners. He said legislation likely will be introduced to create statewide rules, but  each city will decide whether or not to ban plastic bags.

“It will be a good discussion,” Mullet said of the situation in Issaquah. “Once a ballot date has been set, people will become more vocal on both sides.”

On its web site, Save Our Choice says shoppers are incensed that the City Council disrespected their frugal reuse of thin film plastic bags and as a result are spending more dollars outside of Issaquah. It also said that some shoppers feel smugly OK to impose their personal preference for dirty vinyl and cloth bags upon others and that store clerks report a shoplifting increase.

“We firmly believe that the vast majority of Issaquah’s citizens oppose this nanny-state policy and give poor marks to this council for not trusting them enough to have referred this question to the voters,” Craig Keller told The Reporter earlier this year. He is pushing the effort on behalf of Save Our Choice.

The group states “stores have not dispensed so many paper bags since decades ago when forest conservation and superior performance brought about the advent of thin film bags.”

The Nov. ballot has already been set, so the issue likely would show up on the Feb. 2014 ballot along with school levies.