17,121 urge West recall vote

A ballot measure to oust Spokane Mayor Jim West appears headed for a special election in late November, and the driving force behind the recall petition drive said Wednesday she is stepping away from the campaign.

“I accomplished what I said I would do,” recall author Shannon Sullivan said Wednesday afternoon after she and her attorney Jerry Davis carried a white plastic laundry basket filled with signature-filled petitions into the Spokane County Elections office. “All I ever asked was for the voters to have a choice.”

The petitions carry the names of 17,121 people who say they want to vote on whether West should be recalled for improperly using his office. The proposal needs 12,567 of those names, and the petitions carry more than the standard 35 percent cushion most organizations shoot for when they mount signature campaigns.

Sullivan said she was “very confident” the petitions will pass muster. Volunteers took extra care to ask people who wanted to sign whether they were registered city voters, so she expects the rejection rate to be lower than normal.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said elections workers will begin verifying the signatures on Monday, after a mandatory five-day waiting period in which West and his legal team are notified, and both sides can arrange to have observers present for the process. Dalton’s office will have a daily report on the number of signatures verified and rejected during the process, which she said could take two weeks.

More than 20 volunteers who joined a caravan from their drive-through sign-up station on North Division applauded when Sullivan turned over the stack of petitions and shook Dalton’s hand.

“They said it couldn’t be done,” Sullivan said a few minutes later. “We followed through at every turn.”

Sullivan had planned only to sign a recall petition last May after The Spokesman-Review first reported allegations about West meeting young men on an Internet chat room, then offering them internships. But when she stopped by the elections office to ask where such a petition could be found, she was told none yet existed and was given information on how to file one.

A divorced mother from north Spokane with no formal legal training, Sullivan wrote a petition in late May that was redrafted by the Spokane County attorney’s office and defended it herself in June against a Superior Court challenge from a team of lawyers hired by West.

She received volunteer legal help from Davis and two other attorneys when West appealed the petition that was rewritten by visiting Judge Craig Matheson to the state Supreme Court, sharing in the writing of legal briefs and half of the oral arguments before the state Supreme Court on Aug. 24.

When the high court rejected West’s appeal that same day, Sullivan, Davis and a growing army of volunteers camped out around the clock in a North Division parking lot to get signatures from motorists who stopped, and fanned out at large public events to gather signatures.

Now, Sullivan and Davis said, it’s time for someone else to take up the cause. Both will step aside from the campaign that will lead up to the recall vote. They’ll only be involved in any legal challenges that might arise from former City Councilman Steve Eugster, who contends the signatures should not have been gathered until the Supreme Court published its full opinion on why it rejected West’s appeal.

While she said she’ll miss the other volunteers who have become “a family,” Sullivan said she wants get her life back together, to get away from the media attention. She’ll spend more time with her 9-year-old son and start a new job as a legal assistant in Davis’ office.

“I’m really tired. This has been a long, drawn-out fight,” she said. “We never wanted to be running a campaign in the first place.”

Whether one person or a group will step forward is unknown, Sullivan said. At many points during the last four months, people have said they would help as soon as she could pass the next hurdle, only to back away or say they wanted to wait until she passed another hurdle. Although the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Spokane City Council and the Spokane County Republican Party called for West to resign, Sullivan received no formal assistance from any of those groups for the recall.

Now that she’s done everything she said she’d do, Sullivan said she’ll leave it to the voters whether West is ousted. For those who badly want him out of office, she could only say, “Go for it.”