If you’re unhappy with the job Evanston’s City Council is doing, the idea of launching a California-style recall campaign against your local representative may seem like a way to deal with your frustration.
But while 30 states have statutes setting out a procedure for the recall of local officials — Illinois is not one of them.
And it appears that the Village of Buffalo Grove is the the only municipality that has adopted a local ordinance creating a recall process.
Village trustees there unanimously adopted the recall ordinance in March 2010.
Voters almost immediately started circulating petitions to recall trustee Lisa Stone — and she was ousted from the board that November when about 69 percent of the voters said she should go.
That appears to have been the only time the recall ordinance was used in Buffalo Grove.
And, as far as we can tell, no Evanston council member has made a referral seeking to adopt a recall ordinance here.
Be careful what you wish for. While some residents may like the idea of trying to recall Reid or Kelly, the STPs (Same Thirty People) who create most of the nonsense and chaos around Evanston (and who generally support Reid and Kelly) would use this tool to try and recall the responsible Council Members. Why? Because those responsible elected officials are not following the orders of the loud, unelected, and righteous STPs. And, if there’s one thing to know about the STPs, it’s that the means justify the end in their book. It’s why they encouraged Reid to sue the City in the past, why they filed bogus ethic complaints against Braithwaite and the former Mayor, and why they tried to place onto the ballot a citizen led binding referendum measure in Evanston. The STPs will stop at nothing and a recall measure in Evanston would just give them one more tool to attack those who aren’t following their orders.
Can’t agree more on the STPs! (Love that name btw!) They’re the same group who scream for transparency while working behind the scenes to push their latest NIMBY driven advocacy effort and create groups to endorse themselves as candidates.
STP, my new favorite acronym- thank you!
I think recall elections are generally a mess, especially since a special election recall would have very low turnout. We have a mechanism in place to remove elected officials doing poorly, which is just to not elect them at the next election, which I think is fine.