Second District Councilmember Jeannine Pearce
Ian Patton, who has led the effort, submitted the paperwork on May 9 to Long Beach City Clerk Monique Delagarza, who confirmed to the Signal Tribune that week that he had turned in 9,462 unverified signatures for the item titled “Petition for the Recall and Removal of Jeannine Pearce, Holding the Office of 2nd District Councilmember in Long Beach, California.”
Patton, who is principal of his own consulting firm– Cal Heights Consultancy– has worked as a political consultant and helped to form the recall effort last August.
Pablo Rubio, analyst at the city clerk’s office, confirmed by telephone and email Thursday morning that the petition had indeed been found not sufficient.
“We have concluded verification of signatures on June 20, 2018, and found the petition to recall Councilmember Jeannine Pearce to be insufficient,” Rubio wrote in an email, with a certificate of insufficiency attached.
The document indicates that, of the 9,050 signatures filed and verified, only 4,815 were deemed sufficient, missing the minimum required number for sufficiency, which was 6,363.
On Wednesday night, Pearce’s office issued a press release that only briefly shares the news before focusing more on the achievements the office has made in previous months, despite the recall effort, and goals for the next two years.
The press release also states that the council office is “glad to have this process behind them” and that their focus in the last few months has been on governing and representing constituents.
“In spite of the noise, I am proud of my office and the work we’ve done,” Pearce wrote. “We’ve stayed focused on the needs of the district– neighborhood cleanups, community meetings, our own events and constituent services– all while accomplishing great things at council and helping the most vulnerable of our constituents.”
Some of the goals include having the city auditor perform a full audit of the city’s human-resources practices, the establishment of an Ethics Commission with community oversight and addressing the rising rates of suicide over the last two decades.
“My vision is a working government for all that includes representing the amazing constituents of the 2nd district,” Pearce wrote. “I will also continue fighting for the rights of workers, women, the LGBTQ+ community, the youth, small-business owners, landlords and tenants, and every resident of the incredible city I call home.”
On Thursday morning, in response to an emailed request for a statement, Patton wrote to the Signal Tribune that the campaign was “a very successful effort to restore integrity in Long Beach after the terrible embarrassment Pearce has inflicted upon the city.”
He wrote that nine months of concerted political pressure by the campaign led the Long Beach City Council to validate his group’s charges against Pearce and “take the moral high ground” by unanimously censuring her for her conduct, which Patton described as “sexual harassment, dishonesty and conflicts of interest– not to mention her well documented violent drunkenness on the 710 Freeway.”
As previously reported in the Signal Tribune, in the early-morning hours of June 3, California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers and eventually the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) discovered Pearce and her then chief-of-staff Devin Cotter in a vehicle parked on a median of the 710 Freeway, near the Golden Shore exit. When CHP officers approached the car, they found the two city officials in the midst of what Pearce’s former attorney described as a “heated argument.”
LBPD officers performed a field-sobriety test on Pearce, who had been driving.
According to police, she passed the test and officers separated the two. Officers drove Cotter home, while Pearce was allowed to ask a friend to take her home, according to a statement from the department. However, later that morning, Pearce called police to intervene again. This time, Cotter had confronted the councilmember outside her home.
Officers discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for Cotter related to a previous charge for a 2014 DUI, and they also arrested him on a charge of public intoxication. Cotter’s attorney said that his client spent only a few hours in jail that day and thereafter enrolled in the necessary alcohol classes related to his DUI case. The attorney also claimed that Cotter sustained injuries that day.
Patton added that, while his group is disappointed that voters won’t have the opportunity to remove Pearce this year, the “historic censure vote officially labeled her for all time, by the City of Long Beach, as a sexual harasser and corrupt officeholder and effectively ended her career.”
He went on to write that Pearce continues to surprise his campaign with the “depths of her depravity,” considering she was apparently hosting what he characterized as “a sort of celebration” the next day.
As for the failure of the campaign to gain the necessary number of signatures, Patton explained that the division of labor was that his campaign’s partner committee, the Friends of Long Beach, conducted the paid signature-gathering program and the volunteer program, and that the recall effort’s own committee handled all other aspects of the campaign.
“There were issues with the paid program, which I first learned about on March 24 and sought to assist salvaging,” Patton wrote. “Frankly, we believe that Friends of Long Beach was defrauded by the first signature-gathering contractor it hired, Method Campaign Services, and we understand it may sue to recover fees paid for what were apparently false daily numbers being reported. I was being told that the number of valid, non-duplicate signatures by mid-March was approaching 5,000 or so but was informed on March 24 that the number was actually about half that after a re-processing of everything on hand. Unfortunately, I do not have firsthand knowledge of the situation, though, and I have to refer any further questions about what happened to the Friends of Long Beach.”
He added that he had been asked to help right the ship, which he did, he said.
“But, by then, at the peak of the statewide signature-gathering season, and with our small council district jurisdictions very low down on the totem for these statewide/multi-state professional signature-gathering companies, it was effectively too late,” he wrote. “But again, while that was a disappointing experience for us with the original, residents-formed recall campaign, we take away a great victory from this entire effort in the form of the censure vote. We’ll just have to wait a bit longer for the full realization of our objective.”
