TALLAHASSEE (AP) – Florida’s 2010 ballot may include two competing citizen initiatives on growth management because the state Supreme Court narrowly cleared a business-backed proposal Thursday.

A 4-3 majority ruled the ballot title and summary of the proposed Smarter Growth state constitutional amendment “are not materially misleading.”

But dissenting justices said “significant details” were left out of the title and summary that also make a “patently misleading” promise of a right to decide changes in growth plans.

The title and summary of the other initiative, Florida Hometown Democracy, previously had been cleared by the Supreme Court. It would require voter approval of changes in local comprehensive plans that say what kind of growth can take place and where.

Smarter Growth would offer the same thing but only through petitions signed by 10 percent of registered voters in a city or county.

What its ballot summary doesn’t say, though, is petitions could be signed only in the offices of city clerks and county supervisors of elections and must be completed in just 60 days.

“For a retired senior citizen who is living on a fixed income, or a citizen barely meeting expenses and feeding his or her family, an attempt to invoke this purported ‘right’ to a referendum would consume both significant time and money,” wrote dissenting Justice R. Fred Lewis. He added that gathering the required signatures would “be a practical impossibility.”

The Hometown Democracy group challenged Smarter Growth, citing the summary omissions, but Justice Charles Wells rejected that argument in the majority opinion, noting citizens currently have no right to approve plan changes.

“Because Smarter Growth will not conflict with or restrict any existing rights to subject local growth management plans to local referenda, the lack of detail concerning the petition process does not render the title and summary misleading,” Wells wrote.

Hometown Democracy spokesman John Hedrick said the group will ask for a rehearing.

It’s hopes may lie with Justice Harry Lee Anstead, who indicated he concurred only with the result of the majority opinion, not its reasoning. Anstead’s days on the high court, though, are numbered. He’s retiring Jan. 5.

Hedrick called Smarter Growth a “Trojan horse” because “nothing really is going to change if it’s approved.”