The race to save Initiative 77 is on.

At an emergency meeting on Tuesday night, the D.C. Board of Elections issued petitions to proponents of a referendum that would overturn the D.C. Council’s repeal of Initiative 77, the voter-approved measure that sought to phase out the tipped wage paid to restaurant servers, parking lot attendants and nail salon workers. That’s right: It’s a repeal of a repeal.

The proponents now face a formidable challenge: to collect 24,993 valid signatures from D.C. voters by next Wednesday to put the referendum on the ballot in 2019.

The emergency meeting capped off a week of legal drama over the fate of Initiative 77, which was approved by voters in June and repealed by the Council in October. Proponents of what’s now referred to as Referendum 8 had expected to get petitions last week, but a last-minute lawsuit by the city’s restaurant lobby delayed them. A D.C. judge on Tuesday allowed the D.C. Board of Elections to issue the petitions even as the lawsuit remains active.

“The restaurant association cannot be allowed to undermine D.C.’s referendum process,” said Rev. Graylan Hagler, a senior pastor at Plymouth United Church of Christ and spokesman for the Save Our Vote campaign. “We are relieved that the court stepped in and will allow us to take our message to the people of D.C.”

The campaign must collect the signatures in a fraction of the time that most efforts for ballot measures have historically had. Under D.C. law, signatures have to be submitted before the end of the 30-day congressional review period that all bills passed by the Council go through; the review period for the repeal of Initiative 77 is expected to end next Thursday, Dec. 13.

In 2004, a campaign for a ballot initiative to bring slot machines to D.C. collected 56,000 signatures from voters in five days — but more than half of the signatures were eventually ruled invalid and the measure never made it to the ballot.

The signature collection effort for Referendum 8 is being led by Adam Eidinger, who successfully got Initiative 71, which legalized the possession of marijuana, on the ballot in 2014. Eidinger says he is hiring petition circulators for the effort, all of whom will be paid $3.75 for every valid signature they submit.

If the campaign can successfully gather the necessary signatures from voters over the next week, the Board of Elections will schedule a citywide vote within 114 days — just under four months. That would put the vote at some point in the spring.

This story was originally published on WAMU.