Delta Junction voters will soon decide whether a city council member should keep her seat. That’s after a judge denied Stormie Mitchell’s effort to halt her recall election.
In an order issued March 28, Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Patricia Haines said that Mitchell’s case doesn’t meet the legal bar for granting a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order.
That means the election will take place Friday, as originally planned. The lawsuit will remain open until it’s either withdrawn, goes to trial or reaches some other form of resolution.
But Delta Junction City Attorney Pam Weiss says she finds the order decisive.
“I think the court’s order signals what the ultimate conclusion would be in the litigation,” she said in a Monday phone interview.
Weiss added that Haines’ ruling echoes some of what the city had argued, saying “that the case law that the court relied upon was the very same case law that we had cited.”
The dispute dates back to February, when former councilmember Alan Levinson filed a recall petition with the city after gathering 41 signatures, according to city council meeting minutes. It claimed that councilmember Stormie Mitchell comes unprepared to meetings and hinders city business as a result.
The city clerk certified the petition, and the council then scheduled the election to ask voters whether Mitchell should remain in her seat.
But the embattled city council member challenged the election in court in early March, arguing that it should be stopped because the language in the petition didn’t cite particular incidents.
Marc Smith, Mitchell’s attorney, told KUAC Monday that he was hoping for a different outcome but that it was important to have a judge weigh in on the minimum level of specificity required in a petition’s allegations.
“It’s something I really feel that is a valid cause of action, a viable claim, for someone such as my client herself to bring it up to the court and get clarification as to exactly what is considered to be a legally sufficient recall petition,” he said.
Haines ruled that Mitchell’s complaint failed to satisfy either of two requirements for blocking the petitioners’ efforts.
First, the order says any delays could impede voters’ constitutional rights to remove elected officials and that Mitchell’s complaint doesn’t show how the city and its voters would be protected from that harm if an injunction were granted.
The order also says that Mitchell has not offered evidence or argument that suggests she’s likely to prevail in demonstrating how the petition is unlawful due to a lack of particularity.
Haines decision does not determine whether the petition’s claim is true, and she wrote that the petitioners did use “lean” language. But her order says that the claim itself makes a logical enough connection to legal grounds for recall to be sufficient to hold the election and allow voters to decide.
According to Alaska law, grounds for recall include “misconduct in office, incompetence or failure to perform prescribed duties.”
Delta voters elected Mitchell to the council for a one-year term in October, when she received 35 votes; her closest challenger at the time got 12 votes, city election records show.
*This story was updated to correct the spelling of Councilmember Alan Levinson's name.