After submitting a second round of petition signatures last week, a referendum that would repeal Chapter 40B, the state’s affordable housing law, seems a cinch to make it onto the ballot in November, and supporters and opponents alike are now girding for a fight.

On the pro-40B side of the ledger, the Campaign to Protect the Affordable Housing Law has revamped its website and hired a paid campaign staff of seven, including a campaign manager, field coordinator and five regional organizers. Campaign manager Megan Amundson has seven years’ political experience, most recently as the political director of the Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters.

In Support Of 40B

“We’ve got a pretty good campaign organization that’s coming together,” said Tripp Jones, chair of the Campaign to Protect the Affordable Housing Law and co-founder of MassINC, a public policy think tank promoting middle-class growth.

“We’re doing what we can to engage business leaders and others who have access to some capital to support our position, given how important this law’s been to creating an environment here that would be helpful to business and our economy as it comes out of the recession we’ve been going through,” Jones said.

The group is currently focused on gathering support from “key opinion leaders,” according to Jones, and counts six state legislators and nine mayors among its supporters on its website. All three candidates for governor have come out against repealing the measure.

The Campaign to Protect the Affordable Housing Law held its first major fundraising event at Fenway Park last month, attracting more than 300 attendees from activist groups, developers, and community organizations.

Though the group is definitely contemplating taking out ads for the fall, “we’ve got a lot more fundraising to do,” Jones said, before deciding upon a paid media strategy.

He’s optimistic about the group’s chances. “I live right across the street from a development of affordable units at the old Raytheon site [in Wayland],” said Jones, “and it’s fair to say that not everybody loves the law, but I feel pretty good [about] how people will respond to what we’re doing.”

Against 40B

Meanwhile, the anti-40B effort, the Coalition to Repeal 40B, is rejoicing at their progress. A similar attempt at repeal in 2008 did not make the ballot.

The deadline for submission of the second round of signatures was last week, and the group is confident that they will surpass the necessary benchmark of 11,099 signatures, having turned in a pile of signature sheets more than two feet high, organizers said.

While noting that it is still possible for opponents to challenge the signatures, it “looks like we’re headed to the ballot,” said John Belskis, the leader of the repeal coalition, who has been working on getting 40B off the books for years.

“We already got notice from the [Massachusetts Secretary of State’s] office to prepare a 150-word statement to go on the voter information pamphlet,” he said.

The repeal effort has attracted controversy. The coalition had some deep-pocketed help from Chelmsford-based nonprofit the Slow Growth Initiative (SGI) and its backer, Roland Van Liew, which paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a professional signature gathering firm to obtain the more than 66,000 signatures necessary for the group to make it past the first stage of the ballot question process last fall.

But the fallout from that effort posed a few stumbling blocks for the group, with the signature gathering firm, Freedom Petition Management of Worcester, suing the Coalition and the SGI in pursuit of payments it said it was owed. The case was settled out of court last month.

The attorney general’s office also threw a monkey wrench into the two groups’ work, with Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office sending a warning letter to the non-profit SGI in March preventing it from fundraising until it was properly registered with the state. The situation was cleared to the AG’s satisfaction in mid-May, according to Jill Butterworth, spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.

Now that the repeal seems certain to appear on the ballot, the SGI will be withdrawing from the 40B battle to concentrate on its broader mission of encouraging sustainable population growth, according to SGI Director Craig Chemaly.

For now, the Coalition to Repeal 40B has no concrete plans for fundraising events or media campaigns, and plans to rely heavily on word of mouth and volunteer efforts from supporters, said Belskis.

“Unless someone wants to spend a lot of money and support us financially, that’s what we’ll have to do,” said Belskis. “It’s a true grassroots effort.”

This spring, the group conducted a series of 10 public information sessions in partnership with the Slow Growth Initiative, often jointly with 40B supporters who spoke for their side of the issue.