Haines Borough clerk Julie Cozzi on July 21 rejected an application for the recall of assemblyman Steve Vick, on the recommendation of borough attorney Brooks Chandler.
Cozzi approved the recall applications for Haines Borough Assembly members Daymond Hoffman and Joanne Waterman on the single charge they failed to perform their duties when they voted June 13 to set a special election instead of filling a vacant assembly seat within the code-required 30 days.
Resident Jim Shook, chairman of the Haines Recall Committee, said efforts to recall Hoffman and Waterman will continue.
According to state statute, “Grounds for recall are misconduct in office, incompetence, or failure to perform prescribed duties.”
The application for recalling Vick was filed July 15 with the Alaska Public Offices Commission and the borough. It alleged the assembly rejected a “contest of election prior to completion of the investigation as required by Haines Borough Code HBC 2.68.540″ when certifying the election of Greg Goodman last October for assembly seat “E.”
Hoffman, Vick, Waterman and former assemblyman Norm Smith voted in favor of certifying Goodman’s election, with Jerry Lapp and Scott Rossman opposed.
Write-in candidate Karen Hess had challenged that Goodman did not meet borough residency requirements, and she later won a lawsuit in Juneau Superior Court that ordered the seat be declared vacant and the assembly to set another election.
Attorney Chandler in a memo last week wrote the only “required duty” in the portion of borough code cited in the rejected application was for the assembly to “order an investigation.”
According to the minutes for the Oct. 12 assembly meeting, “Vick moved and it was amended to ‘order the Borough Manager and Borough Clerk to conduct an investigation since the Assembly Seat E Election has been contested and impose deadline for the results of the investigation to be presented to the Assembly at their 10/26 meeting,’ and the motion carried unanimously.”
The investigation included a 10-minute public interview with Goodman at the Haines Borough Public Library. Jila Stuart, borough chief fiscal officer, conducted the interview as acting manager while borough manager Mark Earnest and Cozzi were out of town. She asked questions prepared by Chandler.
Cozzi this week also rejected the charge pertaining to the Goodman certification on the recall applications for Hoffman and Waterman.
A 4-1 assembly vote in June set a special election to run with October’s municipal election to fill the vacant seat. Lapp and Rossman joined Hoffman and Waterman in that vote, but are not eligible for recall due to their terms expiring in October.
Vick voted against the election motion and said he supported a public vote, but couldn’t “knowingly break code” that requires a vacancy to be filled within 30 days.
“It was a group decision, and I support (the other assembly members) in their decision,” Vick said. “I think they certainly did what they thought was best for the community, and it probably was in that situation, because we were at a deadlock.”
That June 13 vote led to him being spared from the recall effort, as of July 21.
“I guess I’m relieved,” Vick said. “I didn’t think it was a valid petition, so I would have been surprised if I did get included on the recall for this.”
He called the proposed recall of Hoffman and Waterman “unfortunate,” but said the process is the Haines Recall Committee’s “legal right, so the voters will decide the matter.”
Each petition would need at least 275 certified signatures by Aug. 12 to be on the ballot for the October municipal election.
Cozzi in a letter to Shook advised, “The most important rule is that the petitions cannot simply be left somewhere for people to sign. Signatures must be written in the presence of one of the sponsors.”
Shook said the committee is working toward the August deadline, to “try to save the borough a little money and also save voter fatigue.”
“We have 60 days, legally, but I don’t want to do that, if I can avoid it,” Shook said. “There’s going to be a lot of us out there collecting signatures, so, hopefully, we can get it done in a short time and save some tax money.”