Rain dampens recall effort, organizer says
Door-to-door petition drive falls short, but not enthusiasm for change.
RIVIERA BEACH — Blame the wet start to the rainy season that hampered a second petition drive to oust two city council members, leaving its organizer hoping their lawsuit to validate their initial effort would succeed.
Amon Yisrael, leading the drive for a recall vote to oust members Terence “TD” Davis and Lynne Hubbard, said the second signature drive fell about 400 names short of the approximately 2,200 needed to put the recall on city ballots.
Once the petition drive started, Yisrael’s Greater Riviera Beach Citizens Group had 30 days to collect signatures. The voter enthusiasm was there but so was the rain,
which fell on about 15 afternoons, just when the group members were going doorto-door to get signatures as city residents returned home from work.
“The residents were just as excited, if not more excited, this time,” Yisrael said Friday. “They just want better leadership. They are sick and tired of leadership that doesn’t have a standard of ethics.”
The first recall effort started after the city council, in a surprise 3-2 vote, fired City Manager Jonathan Evans after six months on the job for alleged “malfeasance” without stating specific reasons. Evans had been riding herd over city spending and had ordered an investigation of two supervisors accused of sexual misconduct.
Articles by the Palm Beach Post demonstrated a pattern of self-dealing by council members and the mayor, who awarded themselves among the largest car allowances and travel benefits in the state and made heavy use of city credit cards. They also gave themselves a $12,000 stipend for attending one utility board meeting per month, in addition to their voter-approved salaries for the parttime, $19,000-$20,200 job.
Since then, one of the three who voted against Evans, 10-year council member Dawn Pardo, lost a bid for re-election. Incumbent KaShamba Miller-Anderson, who voted to keep Evans, was handily re-elected. The reconstituted board rescinded the stipend.
Yisrael’s group initially collected 8,600 signatures for a recall vote of all three anti-Evans members. But City Attorney Andrew DeGraffenreidt wrote to the county Supervisor of Elections to contest that effort. Some signatures were dated months before the drive began, and because the 30-day signature-gathering period starts with the first signature, he said, most other signatures hadn’t been collected before the deadline.
The petition group sued, arguing a few obviously mistaken dates shouldn’t invalidate thousands of names collected. That suit remains in court, awaiting hearings.
In the meantime, Greater Riviera Citizens Group launched its second signature drive and collected 1,800 signatures to oust Davis and Hubbard, Yisrael said.
Though the second drive was a wash-out, Yisrael said voters clearly were as angry, if not angrier, about city leadership.
Among the signature gatherers were an 86-year-old woman and a 78-year-old woman, he said. “You had to see it to believe it. They put younger women to shame.”
The council has yet to select a new city manager.