BANGOR – The city’s voters will decide this fall whether the ban on left turns from State Street to Howard Street should stay or go.

After a public hearing Monday night at City Hall, city councilors agreed to send the issue – which came before them as the result of a citizen-initiated petition – to referendum on Nov. 4.

To get the issue on the ballot, those who wanted to repeal the turn ban needed to gather signatures from 2,272 registered Bangor voters, or the equivalent of 20 percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election. The group gathered an estimated 2,600. Staff in the city clerk’s office stopped validating and counting signature after it became clear the citizens’ group had exceeded its threshold.

Councilors had two options Monday night – repeal the ban as requested by the petition or send the issue out to voters, City Solicitor Norman Heitmann said during Monday night’s council meeting.

The decision to add the issue to the Nov. 4 election ballot followed a public hearing that drew two residents, one in favor of keeping the turn ban in place and the other in favor of lifting it.

By taking councilors along on an imaginary drive from his Howard Street home to his workplace on State Street and along on a few errands, Howard Street resident Paul Swenson made the point that Bangor is filled with left-turn prohibitions, one-way streets, a street with stop signs every 100 feet or so and four-way stop intersections, to name a few. Those measures, he said, were imposed in response to concerns over speed, safety or both.

Swenson said the ban was recommended by a city traffic consultant as a safety measure and should be left in place because part of Howard Street, namely the middle section, is only 22 feet wide and too narrow to accommodate large volumes of traffic.

The petition drive, Swenson said, was “based on emotion, not on fact” and that the city should heed the advice of experts. He said that if the Howard Street turn ban was lifted, the city could expect residents of other streets to ask that safety measures be repealed.

James Butler, who also lives on Howard Street and was an organizer of the petition drive, earlier said the turn ban was unnecessary and limited public access to a public street. During Monday’s public hearing, he let the number of signatures gathered speak for itself.

“There’s not one word that I can say that’s more important than the 2,600 people who signed that petition,” he said.

The signature drive was launched a week after the City Council’s 4-4 vote May 28 on a proposal to lift the ban. Five votes were needed to overturn it.

Howard Street, which many drivers had been using as a throughway to and from the Bangor Mall area, runs between State Street in front of Eastern Maine Medical Center and Stillwater Avenue. It crosses Garland Street, where one of the city’s middle schools is located. It also intersects Mount Hope Avenue.

City officials agreed to try the left-turn ban last year in an effort to reduce the volume and speed of traffic on the street. After a six-month trial period that ended last October, councilors voted 7-2 to make it permanent.