SPOKANE – The state Supreme Court on Wednesday published its reasons for allowing signatures to be collected on petitions to recall Spokane Mayor Jim West.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan political action committee has formed and announced Wednesday it would begin airing pro-recall television ads.
West faces a special recall election Dec. 6 after recall supporters collected more than 17,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot.
On Sept. 30, Chelan County Judge T.W. Small tossed out a petition filed by Spokane lawyer and former City Councilman Steve Eugster, who had sought to stop the signature validation process.
Eugster argued the signatures were collected illegally because they were gathered before the Supreme Court issued its written reasons for allowing the recall campaign to proceed.
The opinion issued Wednesday by Justice Tom Chambers, with seven other justices concurring, held that the trial judge acted within his authority when he corrected the ballot synopsis submitted by recall organizer Shannon Sullivan and allowed the recall to proceed.
“First, we note that the role of courts in the recall process is highly limited, and it is not for us to decide whether the alleged facts are true or not,” Chambers wrote. “It is the voters, not the courts, who will ultimately act as the fact finders.”
Justice Richard Sanders dissented, saying Sullivan’s original ballot language had been improperly changed by the trial court judge.
“In this state, and under our laws and constitution, public office holders have the right to conduct their private affairs in a lawful manner without fear of recall,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders accused the court of misconstruing recall election laws, ignoring precedent and embellishing evidence offered by Sullivan.
Chambers wrote that technical violations of recall statutes “are not fatal, so long as the charges, read as a whole, give the elected official enough information to respond to the charges and the voters enough information to evaluate them.”
In May, The Spokesman-Review newspaper began publishing a series of articles alleging that West used a city-owned computer to troll a gay Internet chat room for dates with young men, offering one a City Hall internship in exchange for sex.
Sullivan began collecting signatures after the Supreme Court issued an order Aug. 24 that her recall charge was legally and factually sufficient.
The recall ballot contends West committed misfeasance in office by offering an internship to a young man he met in a gay chat room in an effort to pursue a sexual relationship.
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