Organizers file petition to recall Boise mayor, beginning effort to remove her from office
Organizers have filed a petition to recall Mayor Lauren McLean, starting a process that, if successful, would remove her from office.
Jamie Heinzerling, deputy city clerk, confirmed to the Statesman that the petition had been filed to the city clerk’s office as of 9:42 a.m. Wednesday.
Heinzerling said her office would review the petition to make sure it “substantially meets the code requirements” before sending it later Wednesday to the Ada County Clerk’s Office to verify that the signatures are from registered Boise voters.
From there, organizers will get a letter letting them know they can start gathering signatures. Idaho Code gives them 75 days to collect signatures and file them with the clerk, and Heinzerling said that timeframe could begin as soon as the end of the week.
To successfully call an election, organizers will need to gather more than 26,000 signatures, 20% of the number of registered voters in last November’s election.
To win the election, the recall must garner a majority that equals or exceeds the 23,669 McLean received in November.
Heinzerling said the election would be held on the same day as another election, but the exact date would depend on when the citywide petition was filed.
McLean’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Recall organizers include, among others, Dan Alexander, Joe Filicetti and Karene Alton. They filed Wednesday’s petition, and they and run a Facebook group with nearly 6,000 members titled “Recall Mayor McLean.” Alexander in May started a change.org petition calling for McLean to be recalled that had gathered more than 33,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning, including signatures from nonresidents.
They told the Statesman on Monday that they were upset McLean ran her campaign as a moderate candidate but has since released a ‘”radical agenda.” Their complaints include concerns over the a transition team’s report to McLean that recommended Boise become a sanctuary city, offer free abortions and teach sex education in schools starting in pre-K.
None of those plans have come to fruition or even been seriously suggested beyond the transition report. McLean has said the report was not a policy document, just one of several sets of recommendations she requested from transition teams as she began her term, but organizers said they could not separate those ideas from the mayor after she chose to make them public.
Recall organizers also plan to submit a petition to recall Council Member Lisa Sánchez, the only person of color on the Boise City Council, after she wrote an open letter on Facebook addressing the parents of Michael Wallace, suspected of firing a gun at a Black Lives Matter protest at the Idaho Statehouse.
In it, she wrote to Wallace’s parents that he had “won the race lottery” because he was able to be arrested and taken into custody after the incident. She signed it, “Love, Lisa Sanchez, Brown woman who chose not to have children for fear of their abuse and murder by white people.”
Organizers called the post racist.
This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 12:10 PM.
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