Elections board disqualifies all 5 recall petitions for improper signatures; jail foes ponder next move against county commissioners.

By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@thecitizennews.com

Residents working to oust all five members of the Fayette County Commission are evaluating their options this week following disqualification of their recall petition Monday night.

“We'll have to talk about it and figure out what the next thing to do is,” said Jim Fair, one of 113 “sponsors” who signed applications for petitions to set up recall elections. Fair's wife, Denise, has been at the forefront of efforts to convince commissioners to change the planned location of a new county jail.

Failing that, Fair and Jim Regan, another jail opponent, have formed the driving force behind the recall campaign.

The three-member county Board of Elections, meeting in special called session Monday night, disqualified all five recall applications against commissioners Greg Dunn, Linda Wells, Harold Bost, Glen Gosa and Herb Frady, because the person who notarized the applications, Carl Avrit, also signed them as a sponsor of the recall movement.

The Georgia Recall Act of 1989 holds that no one may sign as both notary and sponsor, and directs that “any and all sheets” of an application notarized by a person who is also a sponsor must be disqualified.

By law, sponsors of the recall application can re-file at any time and begin the process again. But time is short to recall three commissioners who face reelection in November — Bost, Gosa and Frady. Sponsors would have to go through a two-week process to put a new recall petition in motion, obtain 15,000 signatures on that petition within 45 days, and then get a recall election on the ballot before June 1.

Public officials cannot be recalled within 180 days of the end of their terms. Wells and Dunn were elected to their four-year terms in November 1998, and have almost three years left to serve.

Carolyn Combs, head of the county Elections Department, said workers in the department began the task of verifying that signatures on the recall applications were eligible to vote in Fayette County at the time the commissioners were elected, as required by law, and discovered that Avrit had signed both as notary and as sponsor.

Unsure how board members would interpret the law, she said, workers threw out only the sponsors' names that had signed on the same page as Avrit — 10 names in each case. When they had found enough disqualified names (those who were not electors during the 1996 or 1998 elections) to bring the total below the required 100, they stopped verifying, she added.

Board members said they believe it's clear the law calls for disqualifying of “any and all sheets” notarized by the person who also signed as sponsor; therefore the applications should be thrown out for that reason, not because they lacked the required 100 qualified signatures.

“It doesn't just say `the sheet he signed,' it says `any and all sheets,'” said board member Jim Biles. The board is composed of two Republicans — Reid Spearman and Marilyn Watts — and one Democrat — Biles.

Combs said recall organizers were offered a copy of the recall law when they picked up their applications, but said they already had copies, or could find the information on the Internet.

One hundred twelve sponsors had signed applications to recall Dunn; 113 signed Wells' application; 106 signed Gosa's and Frady's; 107 signed Bost's.

The applications accused the commissioners of violating their oath of office, in which they promised to “work in the best interests of the entire county.” They 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, according to the applications.”

Recall advocates also cite a violation of the open meetings law last March. When commissioners learned that they had conducted a closed meeting in error, they alerted the press and submitted information about the mistake to local court authorities. The county solicitor's office declined to prosecute the commissioners, saying there was no intent on their part to violate the law.