The restaurant and bar owners who want to reduce Allegheny County's 10 percent drink tax yesterday started what is expected to be a series of legal challenges as they try to get their referendum on the November ballot.

The group, Friends Against Counterproductive Taxation, or FACT, yesterday appealed in Common Pleas Court the Tuesday ruling by the county board of elections to throw its referendum off the ballot.

Three county judges temporarily serving as elections board members unanimously declined to certify the FACT petition, which collected 44,598 signatures to ask county voters whether they want to reduce the levy to 0.5 percent from 10 percent, saying it is illegal according to county and state law.

They also declined to certify a County Council ordinance that sought to offset the loss of drink tax revenue by raising property taxes.

The judges, Christine Ward, Jill Rangos and Dwayne Woodruff, who were appointed to replace the regular board members because of their public positions on the FACT measure, said both measures were illegal because citizen-driven referenda have no authority to set a municipality's tax rate.

But attorneys for FACT yesterday cited six provisions of both county and state law to argue that citizens indeed have a right to set the rate of some county taxes, like the drink tax, because both county and state law "leaves unanswered the question whether such legislation may be enacted by voter referendum."

Attorneys for the restaurateurs and bar owners argued that neither state law nor the county's administrative code and the home rule charter deal with one fundamental question: "Whether the county's power to fix the rate [distinguished from the subject] of any tax may be exercised by voter referendum."

FACT is composed of restaurateurs and bar owners who have opposed the drink tax since it was proposed last year, together with a $2-a-day tax on car rentals, to fund the county's $30 million subsidy of the Port Authority.