Effort to recall Grover Beach City Council member still going forward after legal victory

A grassroots Grover Beach group founded to oppose recent water rate changes and recall the City Council members who approved them won a legal victory against the city Thursday.

Over the course of the past three months, GroverH2O has submitted six versions of a petition to recall City Councilmembers Dan Rushing, Zach Zimmerman and Mayor Karen Bright.

San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge Craig Van Rooyen ruled the city violated election law by denying the petitions submitted by GroverH2O on the basis of their content, which organizer and former mayor Debbie Peterson said violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

Under an election law that took effect at the start of 2023, city clerks must take perceived inaccuracies to a judge and cannot decide whether the statement violates the parameters of a recall petition, according to the court documentation.

In the case of GroverH2O’s petitions, City Clerk Wendi Sims originally denied the petitions on the accuracy of two lines:

“Dan Rushing voted to make Grover Beach the industrial area of Pismo Beach and Arroyo Grande.” “Dan Rushing approved a project to tear up newly repaired residential streets for 16 wells, a mile of pipelines, and a wastewater treatment plant in Grover neighborhoods.”

Peterson said that although procedural deadlines have passed for the Bright and Zimmerman petitions because both are up for election this year, the Rushing recall petition may still proceed.

Peterson told The Tribune that GroverH2O’s priority is to avoid the recalls going to a special election if possible, which she said could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Bright and Zimmerman recall efforts already will not appear on the November ballot due to deadline issues, but GroverH2O is still looking to attempt to recall Rushing this November, with the deadline of June 5 to get a legally compliant petition signed and turned in to the city, Peterson said.

Can a Rushing recall still appear on the ballot?

Peterson said while there is a path to getting a recall measure against Rushing on the November ballot, GroverH2O will need to work quickly to get enough signatures within the filing deadline.

She said organizers must collect more than 500 signatures between the re-filing of the petition early next week and the June 5 deadline to file a recall petition.

“They’re leaving us with five days to do what the statute gives us 60 days to do,” Peterson said. “We’re gonna do everything in our power to collect those signatures in those five days — we’ve done it before when we collected over 1,100 to repeal the water rate increase in two weeks.”

City attorney Robert Lomeli said the city will review the ruling and evaluate the merits of an appeal to a higher court.

“The court ruled on this matter in a direction that was unexpected,” Lomeli said in a statement posted to the city’s webpage on the case Thursday afternoon. “Today’s ruling made no determination on the merits or veracity of the statements of fact within the citizen petitions and while those items remain a concern, the city will adhere to the court’s direction.”

According to the city’s webpage, the court’s ruling was “very narrow,” and indicated only that the city should have challenged the petitions in court rather than by rejecting the petitions in the first place.

In an email to The Tribune, assistant city manager Kristin Eriksson said Sims took what the city believed were “legally defensible actions to protect the integrity of the elections process and prevent residents from being tricked into signing a petition based on false and misleading statements.”

Eriksson said the city is required to wait 10 days between approving or rejecting a proposed petition to allow for public examination. Previously, Peterson has said this is a stall tactic by the city to delay petitions past their deadlines.

Eriksson said proponents of the petition have made false and misleading statements that misrepresented the true reasons for the petitions’ past failures to be accepted.

“The ruling of the court did not find that that the Elections Code does not allow city elections officials to unilaterally edit citizens’ reasons for recall; rather, it found that an elections official must accept and approve a properly formatted recall petition that contains false and misleading statements and that in order to prevent circulation of that petition, the elections official is required to file a writ of mandate,” Eriksson said in the email. “The city’s intent was not to delay any filing, in fact, just prior to filing suit, the proponents submitted proposed petitions with the false and misleading statements removed, all of which were accepted and approved by City Clerk Wendi Sims.”

In a tentative ruling issued by the court, Van Rooyen directed the city to accept and allow the circulation of the recall petition submitted in April.

“This is a huge victory for participative democracy in California,” Peterson said. “Neither the city clerk, city elections official, city council, nor the city attorney may censor the voice of the people. Everything GroverH2O has stood for has been validated all along the way, and now it has been validated by the courts as well.”