A Pasadena landlord coalition says it has collected more than twice the signatures needed to put a repeal of the city's rent control law on the March 2028 ballot.

Members of Pasadena Housing Providers wheeled 17 file boxes of signed petitions into the City Clerk's office on Thursday, Sept. 10, after a months-long drive to qualify a measure that would repeal and replace Measure H, the tenant-protection charter amendment voters approved in 2022, Pasadena Now reported.

Co-founder Blake Boyd said the group collected more than 29,000 signatures total.

The qualifying threshold is 13,745. Boyd said the group is confident roughly 20,000 of those signatures will hold up to verification, with the total of verified signatures potentially reaching 25,000.

Only signatures the group verified internally will be checked by the City Clerk and then by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, which will run a full count against voter rolls.

Co-founder Simon Gibbons said the clerk's office had already deemed 16,482 signatures "plausible" by Wednesday, Sept. 9. That count covered just 11 of the 17 boxes submitted.

What the replacement measure targets

The proposed measure would rewrite Article XVIII of the Pasadena City Charter, which Measure H created. The group's central argument concerns the Rental Housing Board's makeup.

Under the current charter language, seven of the board's 11 seats must be held by tenants with no material interest in rental property. The remaining four are at-large seats open to landlords, tenants or other eligible residents.

Boyd said the group's own commissioned polling, conducted twice, found 82 percent of respondents favored a board evenly split between tenants and landlords. The pollster's name, sample size and methodology have not been disclosed.

"We wanted to know what the registered voter of Pasadena wanted … Not what landlords wanted, not what commercial interests wanted," Boyd said.

How Measure H became law

Pasadena voters passed Measure H on Nov. 8, 2022, with 53.8 percent of the vote (25,029 yes to 21,493 no), according to certified results. The law caps annual rent increases for multifamily units built before Feb. 1, 1995, at 75 percent of the Consumer Price Index and prohibits evictions without just cause, according to a December 2025 California Court of Appeal opinion that upheld the measure as a permissible charter amendment.

That same ruling struck down two Measure H provisions as preempted by state law: a relocation-assistance requirement for tenants displaced by lawful rent increases and an additional eviction-notice requirement.

Gibbons was a co-plaintiff in the legal challenge that produced that ruling, filed Dec. 16, 2022.

What comes next

The petitions now go to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder for verification against voter rolls. Pasadena City Clerk Mark Jomsky did not respond to Pasadena Now's request for information about the delivery. No tenant-advocacy organization has commented publicly on the signature submission.

If enough signatures survive county verification, the measure would go before Pasadena voters in March 2028. No deadline for the county's review has been announced.