A national restaurant trade group and owners of some local restaurant chains are waging a high-stakes and last-ditch legal battle to prevent D.C. residents from voting on whether the city should do away with the tipped wage.

On Wednesday the D.C. Court of Appeals heard arguments over a pair of lawsuits brought by the restaurant industry seeking to keep what’s known as Initiative 82 off the November ballot. If approved by voters, the initiative would slowly phase out the tipped wage system, which allows restaurant to pay workers who collect tips $5.05 an hour, and to make up the difference if their tips don’t get them to the city’s $16.10 minimum wage. If implemented, the initiative would instead require that those workers be paid the city’s prevailing minimum wage by 2027.

A D.C. Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuits last month. An appeals court ruling on the suits is expected quickly, as the elections board says it has to start printing ballots by mid-September. “We will proceed with a sense of urgency,” said Associate Judge Corinne Beckwith after the hour-long arguments on Wednesday morning.

The lawsuits largely center on procedural matters, saying that the D.C. Board of Elections erred earlier this spring when it allowed Initiative 82 to be placed on the November ballot. Proponents of the initiative, led by the D.C. Committee to Build a Better Restaurant Industry, submitted more than 33,000 signatures from registered voters to put the measure on the ballot, but the lawsuits say the elections board improperly used an old version of the voter rolls to determine whether the initiative had reached the legal threshold to be put to voters. The suits also say the board later denied an opponent of Initiative 82 the chance to review the submitted signatures.

“The point is if there aren’t enough signatures it shouldn’t be on the ballot, plain and simple,” Andrew Kline, a Veritas Law Firm attorney who filed one of the lawsuits, said in an interview with DCist/WAMU. “The proponents had ample opportunity to collect more signatures. The fact of the matter is if you want to get an initiative on the ballot you need enough signatures.”

While the legal battle revolves around somewhat technical matters, the intensity of the fight is reflected in the amount of money the restaurant industry is spending to wage it.

Kline filed the suit on behalf of the No to I82 Committee, which is chaired by Geoff Tracy, owner of Chef Geoff’s and Lia’s restaurants. From March through July, the committee raised more than $312,000. Of that, $121,000 came from the National Restaurant Association, $40,000 from the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, and the remainder from chains including Founding Farmers, Carmine’s, and Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and The Capital Grille.

More than $200,000 has thus far been spent waging the legal fight to keep Initiative 82 off the ballot, largely because a similar ballot initiative — Initiative 77 — was approved by D.C. voters in 2018. It was later repealed by the D.C. Council.

“We expected this,” Ryan O’Leary, the chief proponent of Initiative 82, told DCist/WAMU. “We knew [the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington] and their lackeys were going to fight this tooth and nail. I’m sure they still have plenty of plans to try and fight this in the courts, whether prior to Election Day or after. They don’t want this to happen, even though it’s going to.”

For its part, the D.C. Committee to Build a Better Restaurant Industry has raised more than $300,000, the majority coming from the Open Society Policy Center, an arm of the Open Society Network. Much of that money was spent on the effort to collect the signatures to get the initiative on the ballot.

O’Leary says he’s confident the court will rule that Initiative 82 can be on November’s ballot, and that D.C. voters will again approve it. He also says he’s working to secure commitments from councilmembers that they will not seek to repeal the initiative if it passes, as they did four years ago with Initiative 77.

It’s not clear whether there will be enough political will on the D.C. Council to overturn the measure after two and half years in which the COVID pandemic has ravaged the restaurant industry; several incumbents running for D.C. Council, including Chairman Phil Mendelson, said during the primary campaign in June that they would not vote to overturn it again.

There are currently seven states that do not have a tipped wage, which is also known as a tip credit. Last month, a Michigan court upheld a 2018 ballot initiative that did away with the tip credit there. Critics of the tipped wage say it gives employers too much power and can result in pay disparities. (In 2018, Founding Farmers paid $1.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the chain of paying below the tipped minimum wage.) Proponents of the tipped wage say it can help keep costs down for business owners while letting employees earn more than the minimum wage with the tips they earn.