An Oak Bluffs petition that aims to rescind $400,000 in Community Preservation Act funding for the Bradley Square renovation project has netted the required number of signatures and the question will go on the warrant for the next special town meeting.

Town clerk Deborah deBettencourt Ratcliff said this week that she confirmed 106 signatures on the petition circulated by Donald Muckerheide.

A town bylaw requires 100 signatures to place an article on a town meeting warrant by petition. Selectmen have not scheduled a date or even discussed the possibility of a special town meeting, but Ms. Ratcliff speculated that a meeting could be scheduled sometime in the coming months.

Mr. Muckerheide has argued that proponents of the Bradley Square project misled voters at the annual town meeting in April, when they said town residents would have preferred status for all the affordable housing units in the project. In fact four of the units will be given local preference.

A 40B project, Bradley Square was approved by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission last summer and is currently before the Oak Bluffs zoning board of appeals. This fall the board put the review on temporary hold after a committee was formed to explore possible changes to the project to address concerns raised by neighbors who feel it is too big and out of scale for the Masonic avenue neighborhood. Project backers, chiefly the Island Affordable Housing Fund and its sister organization, the Island Housing Trust, want to relocate and renovate the old Bradley Church and build 11 apartments and artist work spaces at varying rates of affordability under state guidelines. The plan also calls for turning part of the old church into a cultural center and office space.

Mr. Muckerheide this week leveled new allegations against Ronald DiOrio, chairman of the Oak Bluffs selectmen and the town affordable housing committee and an open supporter of Bradley Square.

Mr. Muckerheide said Mr. DiOrio told voters at the April town meeting that Bradley Square would put the town over the state threshold for affordable housing, obviating the need for future affordable housing projects under Chapter 40B, a state law that allows developers to bypass most local zoning regulations. Last year selectmen unanimously agreed to sponsor Bradley Square as a so-called friendly 40B.

But according to figures from the Office of Housing and Urban Development, Oak Bluffs would need 27 additional units of affordable housing to reach the state threshold of 10 per cent.

“The voters were deceived, pure and simple. This doesn’t put us anywhere near 10 per cent [of affordable housing]. The vote to approve that money took place under false pretenses,” Mr. Muckerheide said.

Mr. DiOrio rejected any notion that he had deceived voters, and said he had based his comments about the affordable housing threshold on conversations he had with the chairman of the town planning board.

Mr. DiOrio said Bradley Square, coupled with the affordable housing units planned for the old library on lower Circuit avenue, would put the town very near the state threshold.

“We’re at around 8 per cent now ... these two projects will push us in the right direction. Mr. Muckerheide likes to quote from the record in an attempt to find damaging information. I would hope he could focus on the positives of this project, instead of looking for negatives,” Mr. DiOrio said.

The Bradley Church was built in 1895 as a mission to help Portuguese immigrants assimilate into society. In the 1920s it became the Bradley Memorial Church, the first African-American Church on the Vineyard where the Rev. Oscar Denniston led church services and lived upstairs with his wife and five children. The building has been abandoned for many years and is in poor condition.

The Affordable Housing Fund bought the property in June 2007 for $905,000. Some of the money for the purchase came from fundraising, while the rest was financed through a large mortgage (about $700,000) with the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank.

Frustrated by the ongoing neighborhood opposition, the fund recently put the property back on the market with an asking price of $1.5 million.