With 30 days to get 13,713 signatures, effort to recall Kansas City mayor falls short
Organizers of a petition to recall Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said Thursday — the day before their deadline — that they do not have enough signatures to go through with the attempt. For now.
The petition, which needed 13,713 signatures, was due to the city clerk by the close of business Friday. On Thursday, several people wrote on the Facebook page Recall Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas that their efforts fell short.
“Unfortunately this was total grassroots and we didn’t know enough or plan enough ahead of time,” one supporter said on the page. “We learned a lot and we’re going to come back stronger and we’re going to get it done.”
Reached by phone, one petitioner, listed on the group’s affidavit as Jami Bailey, confirmed that the petitioners are “looking to regroup,” but said she didn’t have time to speak further.
In its affidavit, the group claims Lucas “exhibited poor judgment and inadequate leadership in Kansas City’s responses to COVID-19 panic and the civil unrest that occurred, and continues to occur, during 2020.” But the group’s Facebook page is laced with anti-mask statements and racism.
If they had succeeded, they would have forced a new mayoral election.
Lucas’ spokeswoman Morgan Said told The Star that the mayor’s response to COVID-19 saved lives and “kept our community safer and healthier than other peer-sized cities.
“As he has during his one year in office, Mayor Lucas will continue to work hard each day for all Kansas Citians, and will not be distracted by divisive anti-mask, partisan politics.”
Though petitioners could not be reached Thursday for interviews, their comments on Facebook reveal their thinking.
Some called for Black Lives Matter protesters to be hanged. Others say their constitutional rights were violated by Lucas’ mask order and believe the pandemic is not real. Kansas City and several surrounding counties mandate that masks be worn indoors in public.
In one post, a petition supporter wrote: “the era of the shuck and jive negro politicians is come to an END. No more excuses time for superior intellect and Solutions to reign!”
City rules make recall efforts far more difficult than getting other issues on a ballot.
Initiative petitions — like the one last year that reversed the renaming of The Paseo for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — require enough signatures to equal 5% of the ballots cast in the last regular city election. Paseo petitioners needed about 1,700 signatures. They got well more than 2,800.
But recall petitions require signatures equal to 20% of the votes cast for mayor in the preceding election, and petitioners have just 30 days to get it done. It was unclear how many signatures the recall petitioners still needed to reach the required 13,713.
A recall petition also requires five petitioners to sign an affidavit stating the grounds for wanting to remove the elected official. According to the City Charter, those grounds must “relate to and affect the administration of the officials’ office, and be of a substantial nature directly affecting the rights and interests of the public.”
The charter says that the reasons for the recall must be objective and leave out politics. “Reasonable people,” the charter says, “could agree would render any officials’ performance ineffective, which must be an act of misfeasance, the improper performance of some act which may lawfully be done, or malfeasance, the commission of some act wholly beyond the officials’ authority, or nonfeasance, the failure to perform a required duty.”
Petitioners say they will try again.
