The battle over banning grocery sales at big box stores in Long Beach will now be fought at the polls and could cost the state's fifth-largest city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Long Beach City Council voted in September to ban grocery sales at stores larger than 100,000 square feet, including Wal-Mart, even though the discount retailer had no plans for a so-called Supercenter in the city.

In November a group calling itself Long Beach Consumers for Choice, largely funded by the Greater Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and Wal-Mart, presented a referendum petition signed by 33,391 registered voters that favored repealing the ban.

The petition was later certified, leaving the council three options: to kill the ban, place the issue on the June 2008 ballot or hold a special election on the issue.