WASHINGTON — One of the questions the Bowie City Council will try to answer at their next scheduled meeting Monday night is whether or not it’s too easy for city voters to recall one of their elected leaders.
Earlier this year, residents upset with some controversial votes focused on some development projects tried to recall the city’s mayor and two of its council members. It was the first time a recall effort had been undertaken, and while yard signs supporting the effort sprouted up around the city, the effort ultimately failed.
Now even some members of the council agree the timing of this proposed charter amendment is “suspicious,” especially after the failed effort indicated to some that it’s already hard enough to try to recall an elected official.
“I do hope the amendment fails,” said councilman Michael Esteve. “A lot of communities have recalls, but very few require that you need 25 percent of the registered voters in a given jurisdiction to trigger a recall election [as is the law in Bowie], and almost none have a process by which a sitting elected official can challenge a recall judicially.”
Esteve says three parts of the proposed charter amendment stick out to him, including that provision giving an elected official the option to challenge the recall in court.
Right now, a council member also won’t be subject to a recall if they’re in the final six months of a term. The charter amendment would extend that window to the last 18 months of a four-year term.
But most concerning to Esteve is that it would require residents to choose a predetermined reason for the recall.
“I think having a stated reason as a requirement is not a bad thing,” Esteve said. “But to have the city determine in advance … is a bit limiting and unnecessary.”
Esteve says personal conduct, not political retribution, is the whole reason for the existence of the recall provision, and Mayor Fred Robinson admits that’s why he’s proposed the change.
“I’ve always had it in my head that recalls should be some kind of conduct-related process like malfeasance or misfeasance, or maybe being convicted of a crime,” Robinson said.
He decided to offer the proposal to the rest of the council Monday after the effort to oust him, at-large councilman Jimmy Marcos and District 2 councilwoman Diane Polangin fell short.
To recall the first two, organizers needed 25 percent of all registered voters in Bowie to sign their petition, a target they fell well short of. To recall Polangin, they needed signatures from 25 percent of the registered voters in her district, but even that came up a few hundred signatures short.
“I made no effort to thwart it, I made no effort to comment about it,” Robinson said. “I just let it take its course,” while noting that there is no recall provision at the county or state legislative levels.
Esteve says he considers the members of the council who were targeted by voters to be friends, and says he won’t question the mayor’s motivation in this.
But he won’t vote for the proposal either.
“I think the timing is wrong, I think the optics are wrong,” Esteve said. “And I can totally understand constituents being suspicious about the nature of these amendments so soon after a failed recall.”
But Robinson argues residents already have other ways to overturn decisions made by the council, both legislatively and judicially, and so that’s why he wants to narrow down the scope of future recall efforts.
“The recall provision for me is a very serious process,” Robinson said. “It causes us to conduct basically a whole review, and maybe another election, and I thought the tripwire for that ought to be a little more substantive.”
