(May 17)  SAN BERNARDINO –A tenth San Bernardino municipal official has been targeted for recall.
This week, San Bernardino resident Rey Dandy Lachica had city clerk Gigi Hanna served with a notice of an intent to circulate a recall petition against her.
Previously, a group of San Bernardino residents and business owners led by Scott Beard and Larry Sharp initiated a recall effort against the mayor, all seven council members and the city attorney.
Lachica and Beard maintain there is no connection between the two separate recall campaigns. Beard said he and his group had no beef with Hanna nor with city treasurer David Kennedy.
Beard, in fact, suggested  that Lachica’s effort against Hanna was in some fashion meant to undercut the effort by his group, known as San Bernardino Residents for Responsible Government.
Beard’s reference was to the consideration that Hanna’s opponent in the 2012 race for city clerk,  Amelia Sanchez-Lopez, was backed by San Bernardino City Attorney Jim Penman. Beard suggested that targeting Hanna for recall was intended to remove her from a position of processing the recall filing paperwork at City Hall so that it would be put in the hands of a city bureaucrat who would be opposed to the overall recall effort.
Upon being served with her recall notice, Hanna recused herself from further oversight of the recall process altogether, designating deputy city clerk Linda Sutherland to take up those duties.
In his notice of intent to seek Hanna’s recall, Lachica claims that in her capacity as city clerk, Hanna had engaged in four specific acts or omissions that justified the recall attempt against her. The recall grounds were, Lachica said, that Hanna released information harmful to the city’s position in the bankruptcy filing it made last August, that she allowed Social Security numbers and addresses of city residents to be disclosed in public documents as well as on the city’s website, that her office shrank from issuing citations to illegal businesses and allowed violations of city codes to continue to occur, thereby costing the city “thousands of dollars in fines and penalties,” and that she had not kept accurate minutes of city council meetings.
The recall campaign against the other nine officials is based upon the contention that they have collectively failed the city and its residents by not taking adequate action to prevent the city’s financial collapse. At press time, all of those elected officials had been served with recall notices except councilwoman Wendy McCammack.
If the petitioners succeed in getting 15 percent of the city’s voters to endorse the recall against Mayor Patrick Morris, who is not running for reelection, Penman and Hanna, each of those three officials elected at large will be subject to a recall vote at the regular November election. Petitioners must get 25 percent of the voters in each city ward to qualify the councilman or councilwoman representing those seven  wards for the recall vote.