The Effort to Recall Hales and Novick Has Come to a Quiet (Expected) End

Portland Mercury:

Need some more proof, besides the calendar and the rain, that summertime and its heady dreams have finally left us? The man who announced twin campaigns to recall Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick back in July has announced, a week early, that those efforts have been suspended owing to a failure to collect enough signatures and raise meaningful amounts of money. Ray Horton, a Southeast Portland resident, had until October 9 to collect 35,000 signatures to see each recall petition—70,000 in total—make it to the ballot. His effort was born from outrage over plans this spring and summer to push a roughly hewed street maintenance fee through Portland City Council. But that outrage was dampened and channeled by city officials, who pulled the plug on their initial fee idea and spent several months letting critics and staffers work it over into something else (that may not be any more popular). All told, Horton raised $599.43 for the Hales campaign and $127 for the Novick campaign. Back in August, he told us he had fewer than 3,000 signatures for each official. There was some suggestion an anti-fluoride operative might join up, but the whole thing had an air of curiosity more than anything else—including the moment in July when ing-to-recall-steve-novick">Novick showed up to speak at one of the meetings of the group looking to boot him.

"Our efforts to raise enough signatures to put a recall measure on the ballot fell short," Horton said in an announcement sent out to a handful of outlets this morning, calling the number of required signatures "a higher bar than we expected." He then listed several other problems he had with Hales—among them the mayor's steadily tightening grip on Last Thursday, Hales' embrace of Airbnb, the mayor's signature on a legal deal wiping away years-old punishment for police Captain Mark Kruger's shrine to Nazi-era German soldiers, and, ironically, difficulties in keeping the city's streets paved and maintained. "These issues have not gone away simply because the recall effort has ended," Horton wrote. "We claim success in making Hales and Novick aware that people are watching, and we are paying attention to what they are doing and attempting to do to the city (as opposed to for the city). We will not back away from that, and we will continue to call out the mayor and city council on their individual and collective incompetence. It is what we all must do as concerned citizens and an involved, informed electorate." [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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