Organizers suspend drive to recall Boise mayor, council member. They cite 3 reasons

The effort to recall Boise Mayor Lauren McLean and City Council Member Lisa Sánchez was suspended late Friday, an organizer and a volunteer said.

Joe Filicetti, one of the group’s lead organizers, and Joe Newton, a volunteer who drove a truck with a trailer wrapped with a “Recall McLean/Sanchez” sign, confirmed to the Statesman that the effort had been suspended.

Filicetti said in a statement sent by text message that the recall drive’s board voted to suspend the effort for three reasons:

1. It was hard to obtain signatures during the pandemic because large events, such as Boise State University football games and the Western Idaho Fair, were called off. “People are afraid to open their doors,” Filicetti wrote.

2. The original petition, created on change.org, created confusion about whether people had signed or not. Dan Alexander, another organizer with the group, told the Statesman in July that the online petition drummed up interest, but a review of the online signers showed many did not live in Boise or even Idaho.

3. “The presidential campaign has overshadowed local politics.”

“Rather than pushing volunteers to continue, we are going to suspend the recall efforts at this time,” the statement said.

Organizers needed to collect more than 26,000 signatures from registered Boise voters, equal to more than 11% of the entire population of Boise.

Newton said he had learned of the change while holding a sign to gather more signatures for the event.

The suspension came the day the Statesman published a story about the campaign’s finances and volunteer efforts. Filicetti said the story had nothing to do with the decision to suspend.

In a phone interview, he said it wasn’t going to be possible to collect enough signatures to get a recall on the ballot next May. Organizers had 75 days from the day their initial petitions to recall are certified to gather all the signatures, according to Idaho Code.

“I didn’t want to burn out my volunteers and not be successful,” he said.

He said the campaign would have needed to raise at least $50,000 to hire people to collect signatures, and that money had not been raised. As of July 31, two weeks after its launch, the campaign had raised about $1,430.

Filicetti said he did not know the total number of signatures collected.

“In the first part of a campaign like that, you get the majority of the easy signatures,” he said. “It gets more difficult as you go on.”

McLean declined to comment. Sánchez had not heard that the recall was off until a Statesman reporter called about it. She said she hoped organizers would instead “channel that energy into helping so many people in our community who need assistance.”

“I think anytime people get excited and involved in their community, it’s a good thing,” she said. “I hope they continue to stay engaged.”

Recall organizers said McLean ran her campaign for mayor last year as a moderate but has released a “radical agenda” since taking office. In a list organizers shared with the Statesman, they cite concerns over a transition team’s report to McLean that recommended Boise become a sanctuary city, offer free abortions and teach sex education in schools starting in pre-K.

None of those plans has come to fruition or even been seriously suggested beyond the transition report. McLean has said the report was not a policy document, just one of several sets of recommendations she requested from transition teams as she began her term.

Organizers also faulted McLean for COVID-19 lockdowns that closed businesses and what they called a “common-sense plan to get schools open in the fall,” even though the mayor’s office is not in charge of schools. Her business-closing and face-mask orders were later superseded by orders from Gov. Brad Little and the Central District Health Department.

Sánchez drew ire after she wrote an open letter on Facebook in June to the parents of Michael Wallace, a white man who was suspected of firing a gun at a Black Lives Matter protest outside the Idaho Statehouse.

Sánchez, the only person of color on the Boise City Council, writes to Wallace’s parents that he “won the race lottery” because he was able to be arrested and taken into custody after the incident. She signed it, “Love, Lisa Sanchez, Brown woman who chose not to have children for fear of their abuse and murder by white people.”

Organizers called the post racist.

McLean had been in office about six months when the recall started. She defeated incumbent Mayor David Bieter in a December runoff election last year.

Sánchez, a first-term council member, has been in office since 2018 after winning a 2017 election. She is up for re-election in 2021 and has indicated she intends to run again.