The city of Blue Lake is preparing for the first recall election to take place in the county in 20 years.
Before the end of the year, voters in the bucolic hamlet of about 1,200 residents will be asked whether Mayor Pro-Tem Elise Scafani should be removed from office, the culmination of months of deepening divisions over actions by the city council, including the removal of longtime City Manager Amanda Mager.
While three council members were targeted, at this point only the petition regarding Scafani succeeded in gathering enough valid signatures to move forward to a recall election.
Interim Blue Lake City Manager Jill Duffy said the city received what are known as Signature Verification Certificates from the Humboldt County Elections Office on Aug. 7, showing the petitions to recall Mayor John Sawatzky and Councilmember Kat Napier fell five and four signatures short, respectively, of the 250 required by law. Scafani’s petition was just over that mark at 254.
Duffy said an agenda item to “accept” the certificates will come before the city council at their next regularly scheduled meeting on Aug. 26, along with one to declare a recall election, which the city is required to do within 14 days of that meeting, and then hold that election within 125 days.
The cost of the recall election, which will be paid for by the city, is estimated to be $10,000 to $12,000, according to Duffy.
In an email to the Journal, Scafani, who was elected to her seat in 2022, described the turn of events as “unfortunate.”
“I had hoped that the entire recall effort would have ended last week so that all of Blue Lake could begin healing,” she says. “I am sorry that the citizens of Blue Lake have been made to endure this process, which has divided our community very deeply. It will take years to fully recover from this, if a full recovery is even possible.”
As the recall moves forward, Scafani says there “will be no change in the way I fulfill my role.”
“I am going to continue to do my job to the best of my ability, honestly and ethically, until I either walk out of office having been recalled, or I walk out of office when my term ends,” she says.
Recall proponent Elissa Rosado says she believes the effort was a success, “not only in qualifying Elise Scafani for a recall ballot but having more Blue Lake citizens sign for the recall than originally voted for either Kat or John in the last election.”
In the November of 2024 election, Sawatzky received 250 votes and Napier received 245 votes, according to the elections office. That left Napier tied with former Mayor Adelene Jones. In the end, the dead heat was resolved when Napier’s name was in the envelope pulled out of a box to decide the race.
“This is important because it shows that the silent majority is now engaged, paying attention and are not happy about the way they have been conducting city business,” she says in an email to the Journal. “Hopefully, they will pay heed and adjust their approach. We have already made an impact, as we believe, that due to the pressure not only from the state but from this recall effort, it forced the city council’s hand into doing the right thing and passing the Housing Element. Now it is up to the people of Blue Lake this fall to decide if we want to retain Elise Scafani or not.”
The petition regarding Scafani had 254 signatures deemed “sufficient” by the elections office out of a total of 276, with 22 found to be “insufficient,” in two cases due to duplication.
In Sawatzky’s case, 245 of the 267 signatures submitted were found to be “sufficient,” with 22 “insufficient,” including three duplications. Similarly for Napier, 246 of the 269 signatures were deemed “sufficient,” while 23 were found to be “insufficient,” with three duplications.
Under state Government and Election codes, proponents of a recall — but not the general public — have 21 days after the election office completes the verification process to look over petitions to determine which signatures were disqualified and the reasons why.
Rosado says proponents “will do our due diligence and have requested examination of the excluded signatures.”
If the issue with any of the disqualified signatures was a failure to match the one on record with their voter registration, California code outlines reasons that election officials should consider for the discrepancy. Those could include everything from a shaky signature due to health reasons or aging to a person simply changing their signature over time, as well as someone signing a petition quickly or writing on a surface that was “hard, soft, uneven or unstable,” according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
While there is nothing in state law preventing the proponents from restarting the petition process for Sawatzky and Napier at any time, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, Rosado says she doesn’t anticipate the effort going down that route.
“We are going to examine closely the 22 names excluded to see if any of those can be cured,” she says in an email to the Journal. “I do not foresee us, however, starting a new drive over again for the remaining two outside of that effort.”
The recall effort’s first official steps began May 27, when proponents served each of the three council members with a notice of recall petition, which cited the council’s decision to part ways with Mager, the longtime city manager, and its decision not to approve the city’s overdue Housing Element in the face of threatened fines from the state of California, actions the recall supporters have said “placed this city in jeopardy.”
The council has since taken action to move forward on the Housing Element.
Barring a change in the number of signatures deemed sufficient on the petitions for both Sawatzky and Napier, one issue that had been looming over the city — what would happen if all three council members were recalled leaving the council without a quorum with seemingly no immediate legislative remedy at hand to resolve the issue — which Duffy described as a “major uncertainty,” appears to no longer be on the table. (Read more on that in the Journal‘s July 17 story “Without Precedent.”)
The answer to the question of what would happen if Scafani were to resign is the recall election would still move forward, according to Duffy, who says the “recall train has been set on a track and it’s going to continue until it’s at the end of the line.”
The last local recall election took place in March of 2004, when then District Attorney Paul Gallegos handily defeated an attempt to remove him from office that was heavily bankrolled by Pacific Lumber Co., against which Gallegos had filed a fraud suit the previous year.
Scafani says, “There is a wonderful group of Blue Lake residents who have reached out and pledged to defeat the recall. I am deeply grateful for their love and support.”
“The council has a great deal of work to do which has been made just a bit more difficult by the distraction of the recall. We are working with a terrific interim city manager, Jill Duffy,” she says. “I expect that in the coming weeks, under Jill’s expert guidance, we will take many critical steps forward. I am hopeful that as new information is revealed, the public will begin to understand the full scope of our situation and come together to help Blue Lake succeed.”
Kimberly Wear (she/her) is the Journal’s assistant editor. Reach her at kim@northcoastjournal.com.
This article appears in Global Solidarity at the Mouth of the Klamath.
