Recall, sewer rate petitions submitted

If validated, they’d force special votes

Crescent City Council member Donna Westfall’s efforts to shake up municipal government and roll back sewer rates are moving forward.

This week city officials received petition signatures to recall Council members Kathryn Murray and Charles Slert and to lower sewer fees to the levels they were at before increases were approved to pay for the new $43 million upgrade to the system.

The next step for the city is to find out if the county Elections Office will check the signatures on the petitions using voter registration records to see if there are enough valid ones to place the issues on an upcoming

ballot.

“The county is going to be voting on whether or not they will be doing the signature verification for us,” Deputy City Clerk Robin Patch said. “We hope to hear about that next week.”

The Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday whether to approve an agreement to undertake the signature verification. If it doesn’t, the city would then be responsible for counting and verifying the signatures within 30 working days to see if the recall and initiative processes can continue.

To force a recall election of Slert and Murray, Westfall and her supporters needed to gather 428 signatures from registered voters within the Crescent City limits. According to the campaign’s Web site, crescentcityrecall.com, 488 were gathered in support of ousting Murray and 499 were collected for Slert.

Both council members were elected to their first terms in November, the same time as Westfall.

The recall petitions accuse them of ignoring supposed corruption dealing with the city’s wastewater treatment plant and rubber-stamping the project and supporting sewer rate increases.

They have responded that Westfall is misinformed about the issues regarding the treatment plant and her effort to unseat them is an act of political grandstanding and retaliation for leading a censure against her.

The threshold to put the sewer rate initiative — something municipal officials said could bankrupt the city — on the ballot is much lower than that of the recalls.

According to City Attorney Bob Black, 255 verified signatures would force a special election and a much lower number — 5 percent of registered voters in the last gubernatorial election — would put the initiative on the November 2010 ballot. He said he believes there were 371 signatures on the submitted petitions.

Until the petitions are reviewed, it’s unknown whether either the recalls or initiative will actually result in an election.

“In all of these petitioning processes there’s always a significant number of invalid signatures,” Black said, “because people aren’t registered to vote or they live outside the city.”

Black estimated a ruling on whether there will be an election won’t come until the end of January.

Under state law there’s a certain time window to hold a special election should the recall and initiative petitions succeed. Because the municipality would have to pay for these extra elections, Black said city officials are looking at combining the recall and initiative on the June election ballot if they occur.

“The city’s expenses would be lower if we could coordinate it with the June election,” Black said. “If the signature counting is completed by the end of January, we think we would be able to coordinate these with the June election and save some money in the election process.”

He noted, however, that the city would still have some costs associated with the election because ballots for city voters would be different from those county residents would receive.

“It is going to cost us because we’ll pay our proportionate share of the total balloting,” Black said. “We’d have to pay to print entirely separate ballots for the June primary.”