Removal of mayor no easy process
Long road ahead for bid to recall Windsor official
Windsor residents hoping to recall Mayor Dominic Foppoli over allegations of sexual assault face a potential yearlong battle to remove him from office.
The recall process entails months of signature gathering and verification, likely pushing any election into early next year, not long before Foppoli would go before voters anyway were he to seek reelection to another twoyear term.
The hurdles are high to make the ballot at all, and recall drives fail more often than they succeed. Only three local officials in Sonoma County have faced recall elections over the past two decades, according to the county Registrar of Voters Office, while at least nine other attempts during that
time did not qualify — though all three officials who ended up on the ballot were recalled.
But the highly emotional nature of the allegations against Foppoli are far different from the charges of corruption or qualityoflife issues that typically propel a recall, said David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University. In an era already unsettled by years of protest, he said, the scandal could ignite outrage that engulfs the entire local political landscape.
“This tragedy is unlike any of those past events and has the potential to sweep up everyone and everything in the town of Windsor,” McCuan said. “It’s going to make people look at anyone who was on a campaign mailer for Dom Foppoli differently.”
No petition to begin the recall process has yet been filed, according to Windsor Town Clerk Maria De La O. A group first floated the idea on Sunday, days after The Chronicle reported accusations that Foppoli had sexually assaulted five women between 2002 and 2019.
Foppoli has rejected widespread calls that he resign — including from all three of his Town Council colleagues, the North Bay’s two congressional representatives, all eight of the other Sonoma County mayors and his own brother.
In a statement Saturday, he called the allegations against him unfounded and asserted there were “clear political and social machinations that are outwardly and obviously driving the effort to put my head on a spike.”
The Windsor Town Council has scheduled an emergency Zoom meeting for 6 p.m. Wednesday to “consider demanding that Mayor Foppoli resign.” Council Member Esther Lemus said the panel would discuss how to support residents through the recall effort, as well as whether the town can legally try to remove Foppoli.
On Monday, the state Attorney General’s Office agreed to take over a criminal investigation of the sexual assault allegations after Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch concluded that her office had a conflict of interest. The conflict is that Lemus, who is a prosecutor in addition to being a Windsor Town Council member, and Foppoli traded allegations about each other over the weekend, which were reported by other media. The Chronicle continues to investigate those statements.
Recall organizers are finalizing their campaign team, fundraising operation and endorsements, said interim campaign manager Mark Malouf, and will decide by the end of the week when to file a notice of intent to recall Foppoli.
“Obviously, we hope that Mayor Foppoli decides to resign,” Malouf said. “But if he chooses not to, we’ll be ready to go.”
Once a petition is filed, Foppoli will have seven days to respond and then organizers must design a petition and get it approved to circulate. Even if they submit their paperwork by next week, recall backers probably could not begin collecting signatures until next month at the earliest.
Organizers would need to collect valid signatures from at least 20% of Windsor’s 16,879 registered voters — or about 3,376 — to force a recall election. That is a higher threshold than for recalling statewide officeholders such as Gov. Gavin Newsom or state legislators. Such recalls require signatures equal to 12% or 20% of the number of votes cast in the previous election, respectively.
Organizers in Windsor would have 120 days to submit their signatures for review. Then the county would have 30 business days to verify whether enough were valid. If they were, Windsor officials would have two weeks to set a special election, somewhere between 88 and 125 days in the future.
With that timeline, Windsor residents are unlikely to know before this fall whether Foppoli will face a recall. If it qualifies, the election would probably not occur until spring 2022. The mayorship is up for election that November.
Frustrated constituents and powerful interests have long wielded the threat of recall as a tool against local politicians throughout California, McCuan said, but such efforts tend not to succeed in making the ballot or removing someone from office without an accompanying scandal.
Since 1963, Sonoma County has had 14 recall elections, mostly in the 1970s and ’80s, ranging from a tiny water district with fewer than two dozen registered voters to school boards, city councils and the county Board of Supervisors. In those elections, 14 officials survived and 23 were recalled.
The most recent recall election in the county came in 2014, when a local firefighters union targeted Kevin O’Shea and Linda Payne, the president and a director of the Russian River Fire Protection District, respectively, for dismissing the fire chief. Both were overwhelmingly recalled.
County officials are currently verifying signatures for a recall attempt against Ravitch, led by the developer Bill Gallaher, who founded a senior care home that the district attorney sued for allegedly abandoning elderly and infirm residents during the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Also, parents and alumni launched a recall campaign last month against three trustees of a local school district who supported consolidating two high schools.
McCuan said the allegations of sexual predation against Foppoli were much more toxic than the typical political fights. That could drive the support, including donations, that the campaign needs to sustain itself over the next year, he said, and even ripple out into other races in the region.
“It lays bare the ugliness of politics,” he said. “It has the potential to become the poster child against politics as usual.”