A push for a public vote to overturn the D.C. Council’s repeal of Initiative 77 hit a significant roadblock on Tuesday, as a D.C. bartender filed a lawsuit looking to delay, if not outright derail the proposed referendum.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday afternoon in D.C. Superior Court by Valerie Graham, who is represented by Veritas, the same law firm that works with the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, the city’s restaurant lobby.

In it, Graham raises a number of procedural complaints around the nascent effort to call a referendum to overturn the Council’s repeal of Initiative 77, which was approved by 56 percent of voters in June. The initiative sought to phase out the tipped wage system, which allows businesses like restaurants to pay servers a sub-minimum wage and let them to collect tips on top of that.

Graham’s lawsuit delayed what was expected to be a routine approval by the D.C. Board of Elections on Tuesday of the language of what is would be known as Referendum 8, and prevented the board from releasing the petitions that referendum proponents have to use to collect roughly 25,000 signatures from registered voters to get the measure on the ballot.

The delays could prove to be fatal to the referendum effort. Under D.C. law, signatures to call a referendum have to be gathered in the relatively narrow time frame between when a bill is passed and when it actually becomes law. In D.C., that’s the 30-day congressional review period every bill has to go through.

The bill repealing Initiative 77 was sent to Congress on Oct. 30, and the Council says it expects the 30-day review to be completed by Dec. 13. But the longer the referendum is wrapped up in legal challenges, the less time proponents will have to actually collect the signatures they need to put it on the ballot.

“The restaurant industry filed a petition challenge at the eleventh hour,” said Rev. Graylan Hagler, a senior pastor of Plymouth United Church of Christ and a spokesperson for the effort, known as Save Our Votes. “It’s their latest effort to thwart the democratic process. We will fight this delaying tactic in court, and will prevail in the end. We are not the kind of people to give up on D.C. workers who need a raise.”

Speaking on Tuesday, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who opposed Initiative 77 and spearheaded the effort to repeal it, said he opposed any effort to revisit the issue of the tipped wage.

“Based on the reaction I have gotten since the Council voted, I think most citizens of the District are ready to move on,” he said.

This story was originally published on WAMU.