Helping the Mayor "Recall"

Rumor has it that one of the Mayor's legal tactics to block the Recall from the April 3rd Ballot may be to suggest that the vote on this measure never happened at the December 11th, 2006 Council Meeting.

According to the approved minutes of that meeting the vote happened. At one point in the meeting the council voted on an ordinance to add the measure to the ballot. That vote went 4-3 and as this lacked 5 votes the prevailing wisdom is that the ordinance did not pass. However, it's likely that an ordinance is not required (as we reported earlier here).

Later in the meeting, Councilman May made a motion to put the recall of the Mayor on the April ballot. Though the Mayor resisted at first, she polled the vote with the results being 4-3. After the vote the Mayor claimed 5 votes were needed to pass this measure. However, it was not a ordinance, it was a simple vote which only requires a simple majority (4 being the majority of 7) to pass.

You can see this vote for yourself here:

The existence of this vote is further supported by the approved minutes from the December 11th meeting that were approved at the January 22nd, 2007 meeting.

From the approved Minutes of the

December 11th, 2006 Overland City Council Meeting

(click images below to see at full size)

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Page 8........................Page 9

The approval of those minutes can be seen here:

(please excuse the jumpy camera work)

It appears that this vote did it fact happen. The Mayor and her legal team can argue about the need for an ordinance if they want to waste the courts time, but they cannot argue that a vote on the measure didn't take place.

For your review, we've recently covered the legalities of the Recall measure both here and here.