Judge Jeff Hollingsworth’s welcome decision Friday to cancel the pending August recall election for a successor to Mayor Ron Littlefield was expected, and correct. Hopefully it will end the cantankerous and misguided mission of a small minority of voters who would have wrongly ejected the mayor for reasons of fiscal and administrative policies — annexation, a modest and long-needed property tax increase, and an unavoidable fee to meet state and federal mandates for control of storm-water run-off.
Such issues as those should have never have been allowed as reasons for a recall in the first place. With the recall properly canceled, it’s now incumbent on the City Council — if it still wants to have a unique recall statute — to propose a common-sense recall process that comports with the more stringent state recall law, and that limits recalls to acts of moral turpitude or criminal offenses.
Policy issues typically involve difficult but necessary decisions on fiscal and administrative issues: They should not qualify as reasons for recall. That sort of recall is best left, as it traditionally has been, to the next general election, where political leaders are properly judged on their overall performance in office by a majority of voters.
The recall canceled by Judge Hollingsworth met none of those traditional standards. It was wrongly abetted, moreover, by key deficiencies in the city’s recall statute and by key failures by the petitioners and by the Election Commission.
The city’s statute allowed a misbegotten two-step recall. The first step allowed a small minority of registered voters to demand a recall under properly filed petitions. And if those petitions were certified, the mayor was automatically ejected from office, and a so-called “recall election” would be held at the next general municipal or county election to pick a successor from any number of candidates.