Enough sign for recall effort to move forward against Athens mayor, sheriff, district attorney

And then there were three.

Organizers of an effort to recall four local elected officials have reached an initial threshold for collecting signatures seeking recall elections, although they have had to abandon their effort to oust District 2 Athens-Clarke County Commissioner Melissa Link from office.

Still targeted in the recall are Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz, Clarke County Sheriff John Q. Williams, and Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, whose jurisdiction covers both Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties.

Because petition organizer James Lee, also known as James DePaola, is not a resident of Link’s intown district, he cannot sponsor a recall effort targeting her. Link’s district stretches from the Boulevard neighborhood to Normaltown and across West Broad Street. District 2 also includes an edge of downtown Athens along and near Dougherty Street.

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The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections, a five-member body comprising three appointees of the Athens-Clarke County Commission, and one appointee each from the county’s Republican and Democratic party organizations, learned  Monday from Athens-Clarke Elections Director Charlotte Sosebee that Lee’s effort to recall Link had been terminated.

But Sosebee also let board members know that Lee and others who have been collecting signatures had surpassed the 100-signature minimum in the applications for recall petitions submitted against Girtz, Williams and Gonzalez. The 100-plus signatures collected in connection with the recall efforts all came from registered voters, as verified by county elections officials.

Specifically, recall organizers had collected 159 signatures in the effort to recall Gonzalez, 126 signatures in the effort against Williams, and 118 signatures in the recall effort targeting Girtz as of March 28, the end of the 15-day period allowed for collecting the signatures.

The next step, getting signatures on an actual petition for the scheduling of a recall election, will be a much heavier lift for organizers and whoever they recruit to help them collect signatures.

Organizers must collect the signatures of 30% of the people who were registered to vote in the last election in which the targeted officials were candidates. For the sheriff, the last election was Nov. 3, 2020; for the district attorney, it was a Dec. 1, 2020, special election; and, for the mayor, it was the 2022 general primary.

Sosebee said petition circulators must collect more than 5,000 verified signatures for each office targeted for recall. Once the recall petitions are picked up by organizers, they will have 45 days to collect signatures, according to Sosebee.

Lee said Tuesday that he anticipates picking up the petition signature forms by either Friday or Monday. Under that schedule, the deadline for turning signatures in to elections officials for verification will come at roughly the same time as a May 21 nonpartisan and primary election.

In that balloting, Link is facing a challenge from downtown Athens businessman Jason Jacobs, and Williams is facing a challenge from Clarke County School District police officer Tommy Dorsey. Both sheriff’s office candidates are seeking the post as Democrats.

Gonzalez likely will face a challenge later this year from Kalki Yalamanchili, a former Western Judicial Circuit prosecutor who left for private practice after Gonzalez was elected in 2020. Yalamanchili is working to run as an independent, and is currently collecting signatures to earn a place on the ballot.

Issues related to the recall petitions will be handled by local elections officials, with the exception of the recall targeting the district attorney. That office covers multiple jurisdictions and will fall under the purview of state elections officials, Sosebee explained Monday.

In addition to unanimously declaring the sufficiency of the signatures collected on the recall application, the elections board’s Monday vote ratified the sufficiency of the grounds under which the recall effort is proceeding. Broadly, each of the targeted officials is accused of malfeasance, misconduct, violation of their oaths of office and failure to perform prescribed duties.

More specifically, Lee said, the officials are being targeted for allegedly “allowing illegal aliens to freely roam our county.”

The recall effort began shortly after the February slaying of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at the Augusta University College of Nursing campus in Athens. Until last year, Riley had been a student at the University of Georgia.

Riley was slain on the early afternoon of Feb. 22 while running on a wooded trail near the University of Georgia’s Lake Herrick. The next day, Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was charged with murder and other offenses in the case. Ibarra remained in the Athens-Clarke County Jail on Tuesday, after opting not to seek bond in the case.

During a news conference held by Girtz a few days after Riley’s death to point out current and planned public safety improvements, and to address allegations that Athens-Clarke County is a “sanctuary city,” Lee led a group of about a dozen protesters in urging Girtz to resign.

At a county commission meeting some days later, a group of about 200 protesters gathered outside City Hall to call for Girtz to resign and to push their narrative that the community is, in effect, a sanctuary jurisdiction.

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Later, inside the commission chambers, Lee loudly announced his intention to seek the electoral recalls.

On a side note, in a Tuesday interview seeking his comments on the recall efforts, Lee said he decided to seek the recall as James Lee, rather than James DePaola, because “I don’t like how the press covers things.”

Lee’s reference was to a 2016 incident in which, as James DePaola, he was charged with obstruction of a 911 call, criminal trespass and damage to property after he became irate when his wife put too much cheese on his grilled cheese sandwich.

“Nobody was murdered, nobody was assaulted, nobody was threatened” in the 2016 incident, Lee said Tuesday, noting further that he and his wife subsequently settled their differences in connection with the incident.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Votes garnered to proceed with recall against Athens mayor, sheriff, DA