In 2021, a hard-working group of Blair County residents filed petitions from all 24 Blair County municipalities to put a referendum on the ballot to establish Blair County as a Second Amendment Sanctuary County. If successful, the referendum would require that county commissioners produce an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) that would prohibit municipalities within Blair County from using any resources to enforce new gun control legislation. Just as some US cities had enacted sanctuary legislation to disallow enforcement of federal immigration law, the referendum was intended to prevent the local implementation of new gun laws that restricted 2nd amendment freedoms.
The referendum was approved by Blair County residents by an overwhelming majority. What was supposed to happen next was a consultative and legislative process by which the county, the municipalities, the referendum organizers and other interested parties hammered out an implementation agreement. Instead, the process was hijacked by the county solicitor, Nathan Karn, who circulated his own toothless, referendum-negating inter-governmental agreement (IGA) to all the municipalities, as if it were a done deal. While including some of the language of the referendum, Karn's IGA promises that local government will do nothing to offend state or federal law. All laws are presumed constitutional until they are ruled to be otherwise, so the language Section 2 referring to court interpretation is insufficient to mandate non-enforcement of an untested law. So until a court explicitly finds a law unconstitutional, the IGA as written still requires enforcement of that law (see note from attorney Dan Kiss, below).
Karn was also careful to make sure that local gunowners had no explicit standing to challenge violations of the IGA in court. In other words: no presumption of unconstitutionality, and no 2nd Amendment Sanctuary.
A proper IGA reflecting the actual intent of the referendum, drafted by referendum attorneys Dan Kiss and Joe Addink, was never considered by the County.
Webster, for her part, did not seem to understand what a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary was. Rather than produce an IGA that would mandate non-enforcement of new gun laws, while affording explicit standing to local gunowners to challenge violations in Court, Webster produced a bizarre and unworkable ordinance calling for "criminal penalties" against officials who violated the sanctuary. It was an embarrassment and a non-starter, but the poorly drafted document was quickly circulated to the municipalities as if it were the official stance of the referendum organizers, which it wasn't.
In municipalities all over the county, solicitors attacked Webster's "ordinance" as a straw man alternative to Karn's IGA, ignoring the IGA referendum organizers had actually drafted. Misled by language drafted by Karn stating that "this municipality is required to enter into this agreement by virtue of an approved referendum", most municipalities passed and signed his sanctuary-facsimile document, after which the county commissioners asserted "mission accomplished". (There's no record of Snyder Township, Antis Township or Newry Borough signing on to Karn's agreement.)
Through all of this, Webster promised repeatedly that she would fight for referendum organizers to have a seat at the table in a committee constituted to draft a consensus IGA ... until she abandoned that promise, abandoned her own ordinance and announced that she was tossing her support behind Karn's no-meaning IGA. Turns out, Webster didn't really like the idea of challenging state and federal law.
"She stabbed us right in the back," said referendum attorney Dan Kiss. "She didn't even bother to give us a heads up."
Webster now says, disingenuously, that she "obeyed the will of the voters". That's not remotely true. Karn's IGA is ineffectual and establishes no additional protection for the Second Amendment rights of Blair County residents, as they had demanded through the Sanctuary referendum. The dedicated petitioners who labored tirelessly to gather signatures, and the voters who then passed the Second Amendment Sanctuary referendum by a huge margin, were betrayed.
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From Attorney Dan Kiss:
The goal of the Intergovernmental Agreement was to provide an acknowledgement of discretionary authority to law enforcement that if a new law was passed, there was to be non-enforcement of that law, even if presumed to be constitutional. For example, if Pennsylvania passed a law (as is now pending) to put a trigger lock on all long guns and make it a crime not to have one, our law enforcement in Blair County should be empowered by the IGA to not to enforce the law, even if that law is presumed to be constitutional. In both federal and state law, there is a presumption of constitutionality Ladd v. Real Estate Comm’n, 230 A.3d 1096, 1109-10 (Pa. 2020); 1 Pa.C.S. § 1922(3). The language in Section 2 of the Blair County IGA fails to overcome that presumption.
Another major flaw with the IGA is the lack of explicit standing afforded to gunowners. What that means is that only the municipalities and the County — the signatories to the IGA — have automatic standing to litigate to enforce compliance with the agreement. While it mightbe possible for a gunowner to enforce the agreement through some other procedure, like a writ of mandamus, it is not guaranteed. Pennsylvania courts frequently throw out public-interest lawsuits because the plaintiffs are unable to establish standing, the criteria for which are detailed and onerous.