Tighter Rules Urged on Recall Financing

THOUSAND OAKS —  With three of her colleagues subject to recall drives, City Councilwoman Linda Parks called Wednesday for tighter financial regulation on ouster efforts.

“The citizens have a right to know how much money is being spent [on recall drives] and from whom these contributions are coming from,” she said. “We know all campaigns are full of rhetoric, but citizens will have a better understanding of the rhetoric when they can see where the money is coming from.”

Parks’ proposal--which will be considered at Tuesday’s meeting--comes a day after Thousand Oaks recall mania ratcheted up a notch.

At a goal-setting meeting Tuesday, slow-growth activists served Mayor Judy Lazar and Councilman Andy Fox with preliminary recall papers. One of their council adversaries, slow-growth advocate Elois Zeanah, is herself the subject of a separate recall drive.

The other half of the council’s slow-growth minority, Parks said she hopes that her colleagues will vote to require more frequent campaign spending reports from recall committees. Currently, those groups--Yes! Recall Elois Zeanah and Residents to Recall Fox and Lazar--only file twice yearly. The next filing date isn’t until summer.

The latest chapter in Thousand Oaks’ recall fervor also brought expressions of frustration from Fox and Lazar, both part of the panel’s pro-business majority.

In serving the pair with preliminary recall papers, Residents to Recall Fox and Lazar accused the two of turning Thousand Oaks into a second San Fernando Valley and of voting for an expensive audit of the city’s waste-water facility without heeding the findings.

Zeanah has been targeted for refusing to upgrade the waste-water system and for prompting costly lawsuits against the city.

“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Lazar said. “We are a city who has so many good things going for us. But the entire community is divided and spending its time--wasting its time--on a recall when we would be much better off working toward positive goals. . . . I was concerned when the first recall was served on council member Zeanah, with whom i disagree frequently. I certainly don’t like it when it happens to me either.”

Added Fox: “I think it’s pretty evident in the community that this is a retaliatory recall.”

Zeanah said Wednesday that she would file a complaint today challenging the validity of thousands of signatures gathered in a recall drive against her. But the city clerk, who must evaluate the complaint, said election law lies on the side of the residents who signed the petitions.

In a dispute that will likely be settled in court, Zeanah and her slow-growth supporters say the petitions contain a technical glitch: The petition forms list reasons for the Zeanah recall drive and her rebuttal on one side of the page. People sign their names on the flip side.

State law indicates that such information must be on “each side of a sheet of paper on which signatures appear.”

“We’re going to very shortly provide notice to the city clerk’s office that all of the signature pages are incorrect and invalid because they do not follow the correct process,” said Dan Del Campo, a former council candidate and member of Residents for Slow Growth / Stop the Recall. “All the signatures gathered on those pages to this date are invalid.”

But City Clerk Nancy Dillon said she is not so sure that a violation exists.

“I was informed that if [a petition] was two-sided, it was still considered one piece of paper, and that the signatures could not be collected on a separate piece of paper,” she said late Wednesday.

Shirley Washington, spokeswoman for the secretary of state, declined to engage in speculation, saying, “I can’t apply my interpretation of what a page may or may not be. It’s a city recall so they [the city clerk’s office] are basically the authority in a city recall.”

The charge centers on sections of the state Election Code, which state:

“Each side of a sheet of paper on which signatures appear must include” in the heading:

* A request for a special recall election.

* The reasons for a recall drive and names of recall proponents--formally called the “notice of intention.”

* A response--if provided--from the targeted elected official.

Dillon’s interpretation of that code is “absolutely incorrect,” Del Campo said.

“The section is rather explicit. It’s not at all hazy,” he said. “So the signatures would have to be invalidated. [Dillon] may say there’s nothing wrong with them, but I don’t see how she could read it any other way.”

Based on consultations with a lawyer, Zeanah said she is willing to go to court about it. The ultimate authority in this case is the courts, Dillon said.

“The cases that I am aware of rule on ‘Did the voter know what he or she was signing?’ ” she said. “Did they know that they are saying ‘Yes, I want to recall someone’? The rulings aren’t about whether the margin is a one-inch margin or whatever.”

The head of Yes! Recall Elois Zeanah, businessman Peter J. Turpel, agreed, saying courts rarely throw petitions out on technicalities.

“It’s really very funny,” said Turpel, whose group so far has collected more than 7,000 signatures. “If [Del Campo] wants to complain, that’s fine. The petitions have been certified. They’re fine.”

The Fox and Lazar recall notices are not official until certified by the city clerk’s office. Once that happens, the two are allowed seven days to respond. Then recall backers have 10 days to file an official recall petition with the city clerk.

Organizers of all the recall efforts must collect signatures from 15% of the city’s 69,049 registered voters--10,357 signatures in all--to place the recall measures on the ballot. They have 160 days from the date recall papers are certified to gather the signatures.