Morrow County will hold a vote to recall its commissioners for the second time in three years

In 2022, Ann Spicer decided to lead the effort to recall two Morrow County commissioners.

“The motivating factor for me was realizing how much damage is being done to the county, by the two people who are subject to the recall,” she said ahead of the election, which ultimately succeeded in booting the commissioners out of office.

Less than two years later, county resident Stuart Dick said the Morrow County Board of Commissioners needs to be replaced again because of a strikingly similar message: so the newly placed leaders “can’t do any more damage.” Morrow County voters will consider Dick’s effort to remove the commissioners on Monday.

“We have a real problem here and the problem isn’t because we’re having a recall,” he said. “The problem is because no one’s doing anything about the problems we have here in Morrow County.”

The state considers Morrow County a “frontier county,” meaning six or fewer people live per square mile. But the county is also the fastest-growing county in Eastern Oregon and dealing with the related environmental and economic growing pains that have led to several political controversies.

And those changes, whether it’s in Morrow County or other parts of rural Oregon, are causing voters to increasingly turn to recalls to settle the controversies.

The case for recall, again

Dick, the latest effort’s lead petitioner, said recalling the commissioners wasn’t his first choice.

An Irrigon resident and a leader in a group called Morrow County Citizens for Liberty and Justice, Dick’s previous forays into activism included participating in a protest of COVID-19 restrictions in 2020. Dick also frequently submitted letters to the editor within the pages of the East Oregonian, where his conservative Christian arguments carried headlines like “Godless America the root cause of violence” and “God will have the final word, America.”

Dick’s concerns ahead of the recall are less celestial and more local. He and his group hosted a series of community meetings earlier this year where the commissioners were invited to make their case. Dick came away with the impression commissioners were unwilling to listen to their concerns, so he moved ahead with the recall of Morrow County Commissioners David Sykes, Roy Drago Jr. and Jeff Wenholz.

The 2022 recall resulted in the ouster of former Commissioners Jim Doherty and Melissa Lindsay. By the time of the recall, Sykes had already won an open seat on the board and Lindsay had lost her reelection bid to Wenholz. When Sykes and Wenholz took office, they appointed Drago to fill Doherty’s seat.

“The commissioners don’t rule. It’s the people that rule,” Dick told OPB. “They’ve got to listen to the people. I guess that’s how we get people’s attention. We have to file a recall.”

The recall involves an ongoing dispute between the Morrow County Health District and the Boardman Fire Rescue District over ambulance coverage. The elected boards overseeing the two districts have also found themselves on opposite sides of the recalls. Boardman Fire board members backed the 2022 recalls, and although the fire chief denied it was political, the district hung up a sign critical of Doherty and Lindsay. The latest recall features the signatures from several board members for the health district.

Dick accused the commissioners of failing to be transparent with the health district and said a recent decision to split ambulance service between the two districts left too many unanswered questions. Dick also said the commissioners failed to act on the ongoing nitrate crisis in the Lower Umatilla Basin, where many county residents who rely on domestic wells can’t safely drink their water because of decades of agricultural pollution. If the issues seem familiar to Morrow County voters, it’s because they also surfaced in the 2022 recall.

Recall supporters also take issue with the Board of Commissioners’ use of tax abatements to lure data centers from Amazon Web Services. Dick said Amazon was not sending enough money back to the community in these deals and pointed to an Oregon Ethics Commission ruling that fined a former county commissioner for failing to disclose how he could profit from a previous deal.

Dick said Doherty and Lindsay did a lot of good for the county and shouldn’t have been recalled, but maintained that recalling the commissioners this time was the right course for the county, even if it resulted in another turnover in county leadership.

Commissioners defend themselves

Sykes moved to Morrow County in 1980 so he could buy the Heppner Gazette, the county seat’s newspaper, eventually expanding his businesses to include a real estate company and a print shop.

After spending his career as a journalist, Sykes said he wanted to try his hand at governing, winning the 2022 board seat.

“I’ve been in the news business, I covered the government meetings,” he said. “I thought I could handle this job.”

The recall supporters’ accusations are either untrue, Sykes said, or come from issues inherited from the last board.

He argued that the county negotiated with both ambulance services and the current split was the best option available before the county implements a permanent plan. He highlighted that the county secured millions of dollars in federal grants to connect Lower Umatilla Basin residents with clean water. Amazon, he added, was only one of several companies that benefited from tax abatements, and even with the tax cuts, it was still one of the top taxpayers in the county.

Beyond the policy debate, Sykes is also making a new argument. If the recall election is successful, Gov. Tina Kotek will appoint the replacements. While the Democratic governor would have the power to appoint new commissioners in the heavily Republican county, Sykes said his biggest concern isn’t about partisan politics, but instead about a Salem politician making decisions for Morrow County.

In an email, Wenholz offered a similar defense of his job and added that Dick had made the recall plans clear early in his tenure. Wenholz thinks a successful recall will slow county progress and lead to apprehension and uncertainty over the direction of the county under the replacement commissioners.

“When Dave and I campaigned, people heard that we wanted to promote good governance and not micromanage the operations of the County,” he wrote. “I feel that we have lived up to that and shown that we view our role as providing policy and direction for the County.”

Wenholz supported the previous recall effort, having signed the petitions for Doherty and Lindsay’s removal. The key difference between the recalls was that in 2022, the recall was from “two ladies from Heppner” who opposed the firing of the county manager while the current recall is about “retaliation,” Wenholz said.

Sykes said he was not involved in the previous recall campaign but declined to say how he voted. Drago signed the Lindsay recall petition, but was traveling when reached for comment and did not respond to a follow-up email.

Drago is fighting to stay in office in more ways than one. In addition to the recall, he’s also running for a full four-year term on the board. After coming in second in the primary with 28% of the vote, Drago is set to compete in a runoff election in November.

The politics of recalls

Oregon has seen a surge in recalls in recent years, mostly in rural areas. The state hosted 10 recall elections in 2022, and after holding another six in 2023, Oregon has racked up six recalls so far this year, with another three, including Morrow County’s, slated for later this month.

Joshua Spivak has spent decades studying those recalls and many others.

A research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Spivak wrote a book about recalls in 2021 and maintains a blog where he tracks the electoral efforts across the country.

Oregon was the first state to pass a statewide recall law in 1908, according to Spivak, and several other states would join with their own spins on the concept.

Washington’s recall law requires a court to review whether an official facing recall committed “malfeasance” or violated their oath of office before efforts can move forward. The bar in Oregon is much lower.

Recalls can’t be held within the first six months of an elected official’s current term, but otherwise, Oregon petitioners can recall any local or state official as long as they submit the requisite amount of voter signatures.

Collecting signatures is the biggest challenge for most recalls, Spivak said, and many die on the vine before ever reaching the ballot. But if a recall does attract enough signatures to trigger an election, it has a high rate of success.

“Two-thirds of the people facing recall may lose their position, which is a huge difference from a regular reelection where most people survive and win the reelection race,” he said.

Rural areas can be ripe for recalls because petitioners need to collect fewer signatures, and people often have more local connections to find those signatures.

Spivak said it’s difficult to determine if recalls are on the rise nationally, but the internet has made it easier than ever to organize signature gathering, communicate with supporters and fundraise to sustain a campaign.

John Day held the first Oregon recall election of 2024, when voters removed the mayor amid allegations she violated state law and the city charter.

In February, the small town of King City in Washington County recalled four city councilors over a contentious road extension. Two months later, voters in the Elsie Vinemaple Rural Fire Protection District on the North Coast booted three board members after the board terminated the district’s fire chief. And in June, the city of Gervais recalled three city councilors a year after recalling two other city councilors amid a spate of high-profile employee departures.

Spivak has heard arguments that recalls shouldn’t exist because of the effect it has on the stability of government. The more turnover there is in government, the less institutional knowledge officeholders have to accomplish policy goals, the argument states. . And while recalls could be perceived to be a sign of growing distrust in government, Spivak said they show the opposite of voter apathy.

“One of the interesting parts about a recall is that it really involves a lot of work for the voters,” he said. “They have to go collect signatures, they have to get everything together. And sometimes they have money behind it, but sometimes they don’t. And you got to turn them in, you got to get everyone interested and enraged.”

Sykes acknowledged that these recalls were coming at a time of immense change for parts of rural Oregon, especially Morrow County. But Sykes also remembered the harder times in the county, when Heppner lost its sawmill in the 1990s or when the Boardman coal plant closed in 2020, taking away hundreds of jobs. Morrow County’s economy was in much better shape today, Sykes said, and change will continue to come.

“People have a hard time with change, but you can manage it,” he said. “You can cause it to do good things for you, if you keep involved and keep an open mind and talk things over with people.”