Complains target all 5 county commissioners, allege board is not "working in the best interest of the county."

By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@thecitizennews.com

A meeting at which Fayette County commissioners violated the state open meetings law last March, coupled with the group's refusal to form a citizens' committee to study plans for a new county jail, are cited as grounds for an application filed last week to remove all five commissioners from office.

Denise Fair has filed an application to recall commissioners Linda Wells and Greg Dunn, and John Regan has filed against commissioners Harold Bost, Herb Frady and Glen Gosa. Fair and Regan have been staunch opponents of the commissioners' plan to build a new county jail and courthouse at the existing downtown Fayetteville site.

Fair said Monday she believes she will have no trouble gathering the signatures of 100 sponsors, as required by law, to set her recall in motion. The deadline for submitting those signatures is Feb. 10, 15 business days after the filing of the recall application last Wednesday.

“I truly don't believe they are working in the best interests of the entire county,” Fair said this week.

If the signatures are submitted on time, county elections officials have five days after they are received to verify them. The sponsors must be verified as residents who were eligible to vote at the time the commissioners were elected.

Wells and Dunn were elected in 1998, Frady, Gosa and Bost in 1996. Since Fair was not an elector in 1996, she could not legally file that application, so Regan stepped in.

Once the signatures are verified, the commissioners have four days to decide if they want to ask the Fayette Superior Court to halt the recall petitions for lack of sufficient grounds.

As grounds, the petitions cite a March 1999 meeting in which commissioners, meeting in a closed session to discuss individual employees' performance, drifted into a discussion of the county's merit pay system, a discussion that is required to be conducted in public by state law. When commission members were informed by county attorney Bill McNally that they had violated the state open meetings law, they issued a press release apologizing for the error.

Commissioners also violated their oath of office, according to Fair and Regan. They promised to “work in the best interests of the entire county,” says the recall petition, adding that commissioners failed to serve the best interests of Fayetteville residents by refusing to evaluate alternative locations for the planned jail, or to consider forming “a committee, to include citizens, to discuss the proposed jail issue.”

If a Superior Court judge decides that there are sufficient grounds to continue, the petitioners must get 30 percent of the voters who were eligible to vote for the commissioners to sign the recall petition — about 15,000 signatures — to force a recall election in which a majority of those voting could dismiss the commissioners from office.