The City Council discusses a recall provision during its Jan. 7 meeting.
Reminder Publishing screen capture by Tyler Garnet
CHICOPEE — During the Jan. 7 City Council meeting, the council discussed a favorable Rules Committee report regarding adopting a proposed recall provision for an elected official.
The provision states that any holder of an elective city office in Chicopee may be recalled from office for any reason by the registered voters of the city as provided in this act. An initial recall affidavit signed by at least 500 registered voters, containing their name and address, may be filed with the city clerk.
The Registrar of Voters would verify the signatures on the initial recall affidavit within 14 days of the receipt and if there is a sufficient number of verified signatures, the clerk shall deliver to the first 10 registered voters who signed an affidavit a formal numbered and printed recall petition sheet.
The 10 registered voters will have 30 days to file their signed recall petition sheets.
To proceed with the recall election, the city clerk must receive within 30 days the required number of signed recall petition sheets containing signatures, names and street addresses of at least 5,000 registered voters within Chicopee.
Ward 1 City Councilor Abigail Arriaga mentioned some residents were opposed to the current proposal and she agreed with some of them.
She said, “I’d rather have it be a percentage than 5,000 registered voters. I would be happy with it at 20%. This to me just seems almost impossible. When you have your voters that are speaking out, it just seems like it would be harder to remove someone that really needs to be removed.”
When discussing the recall provision at the Rule Committee meeting on Dec. 12, City Council President Frank Laflamme mentioned this item has been discussed for months with multiple edits already.
“We put a committee together to review our complete charter and ideas from that committee came out over a year and a half ago. This has been brought before us several times and I’m hoping we can come to a final to give to the City Council,” Laflamme said.
When the charter committee was initially formed, they discussed a recall process after people complained there was no recall provision when a city councilor was accused of posting sexist remarks on social media.
Years before the city councilor incident, a mayor was arrested for extortion just before a November election. Although he was not reelected and his term ended in January, the city could not expel him earlier.
The provision also calls for any elected or appointed official who is indicted to be placed on paid administrative leave. If they are convicted, they are to be immediately fired.
City Councilor At-Large Timothy Wagner shared similar thoughts about the number of registered voters required being too high.
The original proposal said the first step of the provision requires voters to submit a petition with a minimum of 500 signatures of registered voters demanding a recall. Once that is certified, a petition with 25% of the city’s registered voters must be submitted within 30 days. The City Council then must set a special election within 90 days.
At the Rules Committee on Dec. 12, the group lowered the number of registered voters from 9,000 to 10,000, or 25%, to 5,000 signatures before submitting it to the City Council.
Wagner said, “The 25% down to 5,000, that’s actually less than 20% because about 10% of the registered voters of the city of Chicopee is around 4,400 based on the clerk’s last numbers that he gave me, however, I’m still not in favor of this. The 500 number for any office holder required, regardless of ward or at-large, is extremely high. Long and gone are the days of when mayoral races would generate over 10,000, sometimes 12,000 or 13,000 voters. That just doesn’t happen anymore.”
For example, Wagner stated that many people in wards we elected with only a couple hundred votes and sometimes no more than 400 votes.
“I know that when I was elected to the School Committee, it was just shy of six [hundred] for one of the highest turnout wards in [the] city. That’s just pretty sad, frankly, and it’s going to be impossible for anyone to anyone to perform a recall under this provision,” Wagner said.
Laflamme, who filed the order, agreed it would be best to send back to the Rules Committee again for further edits after hearing from the public and other city councilors.
If approved, it would be ordered that a petition to the General Court, accompanied by a bill for a special law relating to the recall of any holder of elective office on in Chicopee to be filed in the General Court with an attested copy of this order, be and hereby is, approved under Clause 1 of Section 8 of Article 2 of the Amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, so that the attached legislation be adopted precisely as followed.
