NOREEN: A recall? You can't be serious
Last week Patrick Ayers, the Colorado Springs man who in November launched a recall effort against Mayor Lionel Rivera and Vice Mayor Larry Small, acknowledged he wouldn’t be turning in any signatures to the city clerk’s office. To remove Rivera and Small, Ayers needed about 14,000 signatures.
Ayers wouldn’t say how far short of the mark he fell, but it is a good bet he didn’t come close. He had no organization and he didn’t try very hard.
“I’m not going to fess up to anything. I’m afraid of what you might print,” Ayers said. “I just know they didn’t have enough to fill up the boxes.”
In fact, the apex of the recall effort occurred when Ayers organized a news conference in front of city hall three days after Election Day.
It was the tired old strategy: Schedule a news conference for 11 a.m., so television stations will have a nice live location for their noontime news broadcasts. Accuse Rivera of ethical violations and chastise Small for yelling at a private citizen, Doug Bruce.
Ayers could have launched the recall effort so the election could have been held on Election Day. But he wanted his show, his moment, his own time in front of the cameras, and he got it.
Trouble is, we need serious people, Mr. Ayers.
There is a lot of polarity now in Colorado Springs. Sometimes it seems like the city that wants to argue with itself.
If you’re going to carry a proposal forward, if you want a campaign of some kind, then do it. Don’t shine us on with some nonsense.
By making it partly about the poor, misunderstood Douglas Bruce, Ayers obviously hoped to tap into the same anger voters exhibited at the polls on Nov. 2, when they approved Bruce’s ballot initiative. Ayers acknowledged that after his news conference, he called Bruce, who has long experience circulating petitions.
Unfortunately, Ayers said, Bruce “gave me a 30-minute lecture on taxes and the U.S. Constitution and I got a headache.”
Welcome to our world, Mr. Ayers.
Theses are challenging economic times and we already know city hall probably will have make tough choices to cut services again. That’s going to make more people unhappy — maybe unhappy enough to launch another recall.
But recall elections should be a last resort, not the first thing we think of every time we disagree with a public official. We’re going to have our disagreements, no doubt about that, but maybe we shouldn’t go out of our way to pick fights like these.
Maybe we have enough to fight about already.
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