John Day voters appear to recall mayor

Early results show that residents in John Day have voted to recall their mayor just a year after she took office. A group of citizens and city employees moved to begin the recall process after filing a criminal complaint against Mayor Heather Rookstool last fall. Both the complaint and the recall petition allege that Rookstool overstepped the legal role of her office by taking on duties belonging to the city manager. The recall went to a vote this month after Rookstool refused to resign in December.

Antonio Sierra is OPB’s rural communities reporter. He joins us with more details on the recall effort and what comes next for the city.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today in John Day. Early results from a special election show that residents there appear to have recalled their mayor just a year after she took office. A group of citizens and city employees moved to begin the recall process after filing a criminal complaint against Mayor Heather Rookstool last fall. Antonio Sierra is OPB’s

rural communities reporter. He joins us with more details on the recall effort and what might come next for the city. Antonio, welcome back.

Antonio Sierra:  Hi, Dave.

Miller: I want to start just a little bit in the past. It wasn’t that long ago when Heather Rookstool won a close election. It was November of 2022. What were the big issues in that race?

Sierra: What Heather publicly campaigned on was a platform of public transparency and respect, not super specific but whatever it was, it was enough for her to be the incumbent mayor who had been on the city council for many years. She took office in January and things quickly came to a head from there.

Miller: It was actually a relatively close election. She won 53% of the vote. You said things pretty quickly came to a head. When did people start to turn against her?

Sierra: I think tensions were already there from the beginning, but I think things really came to a head in August. Rookstool called an emergency meeting, and at that meeting she wanted to further expand her powers as mayor. People in the community were very concerned and upset, and by the end of that meeting, both the city recorder and one of the city councilors had resigned.

Miller: What were the allegations in the criminal complaint that some folks filed back in September?

Sierra: A lot of it is in relation to that meeting. I think one of the consistent themes throughout that complaint is that Rookstool attempted to take on a lot more power than was given to her in the city charter. At the time that she took office, there was no permanent city manager, so I think there’s an expectation that she would take on some more administrative duties and the city council quickly came to an agreement that would allow her to do that.

What the complaint alleges is that she falsified documents in order to give herself even more power than what was agreed upon. And then, over the course of the ensuing months in her term, she violated public meeting law and open records law in order to shield some of the activities that she was doing, and all this was being done to kind of break down the firewall between the John Day City Council and the city administration and the people who actually work there. And that inspired them to file this complaint with the Oregon Department of Justice and Oregon State Police, with the hope that it would lead to some sort of investigation.

Miller: Who are the most prominent people who have been making these accusations?

Sierra: I think the interesting thing about this is that it’s being led by city employees - current and former city employees. So it’s not just some disgruntled members of the community, it’s also people who work in public works, or people who work at City Hall in an administrative capacity, as well as the former city manager, Nick Green. So they were the big players in it, although I know there’s also some everyday residents who also signed on to it.

Miller: Is this also about policy decisions that the mayor took, or largely about process and allegations of abuse of power?

Sierra: To me, I think it’s both. Again, she’s being accused of not honoring the division of power between the city council - the political body - and the city workers, who are responsible for the day-to-day tasks of running a city. But I think there’s a deeper issue here, where they feel that all this is being done in service of undoing some of the progress that John Day has made in trying to grow and become a more modern town.

Miller: How has the mayor responded to these various accusations?

Sierra: She hasn’t said a lot publicly. I’ve reported on this issue for several months now, and she has never talked to me on the record about this. And from what I’ve heard from people who are concerned about this, she also doesn’t talk a lot about this at city council meetings. She just says that, “duly noted,” and “we’re gonna move on.” However, when she was  the subject of a recall, there’s something called a statement of justification, which allows her to put an official statement for the record defending herself. And in that statement, she said that all the accusations against her are false and that her critics have no evidence to back them up.

Miller: The criminal complaint that we’ve been talking about, that’s separate from the recall, right?

Sierra: Yeah, these are two separate things. The complaint was about getting state authorities to act and do an investigation and maybe even bring some sort of charges against Rookstool, while the recall was about using the electoral process to try to remove her from office. So two different things, although a lot of the people who signed on to the criminal complaint are also the people behind the recall, and speaking with the leaders of the recall, they felt that they weren’t getting enough traction with the state and wanted to take action sooner rather than later. And so they initiated the recall process.

Miller: What does it take to get a recall on the ballot? And then if that happens, for the resulting election to be valid?

Sierra: The recall process can be initiated, I think six months after an elected official takes office, and what they need to do in order to start that process, they need to collect signatures from 15% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election. Now in a town as small as John Day, that’s the equivalent of only a few hundred  voters. And the recall committee that sponsored it said they only needed two days in order to collect all the signatures.

After that the signatures need to be verified, and in this case they need to be verified by the Grant County Clerk, who is the top elections administrator in Grant County. And after that, it’s a pretty quick process. They call the special election in mid-January. I think in total, from the time that the chief petitioner started collecting signatures or started a petition, from the time of the election, [it] was only in the span of a few months.

Miller: As I noted, we’re going to have the official results tomorrow. But what do we know from the unofficial results that have already been released?

Sierra: The early results show that the mayor is getting recalled, that their attempt is successful. Now again, this is kind of like when she was elected, this is a very close margin. There’s only 20 votes that separate yes from no. However, I spoke with the county clerk and she says based on the low turnout and how past election cycles have gone, she doesn’t really expect the outcome to change, if there are a few ballots that come in after election day.

Miller: OK, so let’s assume that the clerk is right. The initial vote count stands. I understand there’s actually still a question of what happens next.

Sierra: The city charter gives the city council the power to appoint the next mayor. So after certification the city council will declare vacancy, and then they’ll get the decision on who the next mayor will be. And that’ll be a pretty impactful decision because whoever they appoint will be in office until the end of Rookstool’s term, which runs through the end of 2026.

Miller: This isn’t the only position that’s handled some drama. What’s been going on with the city council, with the city manager, with the city recorder?

Sierra: I think a lot of this controversy started because there was no permanent city manager, and there was no city manager for about a year and a half. And during that period, the city also ran through two different interim city managers. So there wasn’t anybody who was leading the city on a day-to-day basis. The longtime city recorder quit during that meeting I mentioned earlier in our conversation, and she had been there for a very long time. And so much of the city council has turned over that most of the city council are now appointments - very few of them are elected.  And one recall supporter I talked to was really concerned about the new appointment for mayor, because most of the city council hasn’t been democratically elected, and now the mayor won’t be either.

Miller: Because the mayor will be selected by an unelected member of the new city council.

Sierra: Yes, by my count all but one of the members of the city council is appointed rather than elected.

Miller: What does all this say about the climate of John Day city government right now?

Sierra: The folks I’ve talked to about this say that the problems with John Day go beyond Heather Rookstool, that there’s this bigger debate and conflict over the future of John Day. I mentioned the former city manager, Nick Green, earlier, and he got a lot of novel projects going related to housing and utilities, and then he resigned, I think in 2022, amidst a lot of pushback from some of the more conservative members of the community. There’s another faction who wants to see John Day preserved closer to what it’s been for a long time, a small town with conservative values. So this is a much bigger issue than one elected official or even a handful of elected officials.

Miller: John Day seems like a particularly heated example right now, but the city is not alone in terms of turnover and drama in rural Oregon governments these days. What else have you been paying attention to?

Sierra: I think this kind of thing is happening all over the region, all over rural Oregon. Last year I reported on the Baker City Council, which is in Northeast Oregon, and they had so much infighting and so much disagreement on various topics that all of the city council members resigned. There was no one sitting on the Baker City Council, and it got to be such a problem that the Baker County Commissioners had to step in and appoint new city councilors so that the city could start running again.

We’re talking about recalls in 2022, the Morrow County Board of Commissioners, they also went dark because two of their commissioners were recalled, again, over disagreements on local issues. And there weren’t enough commissioners to hold county business, and the issue wasn’t really resolved until a couple of county commissioners took office from an election that was held a few months prior.

So I think this is a trend you’re seeing around rural Oregon, where the small governments are struggling to function as it is to provide basic services. And this political dysfunction is only compounding the problem. So I think it’s a tough nut to crack.

Miller: Antonio, thanks very much.

Sierra: Thanks a lot, Dave.

Miller: Antonio Sierra is OPB’s rural communities reporter.

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