Town Not Afraid to Use Recall Option

ISLETON, Calif. —  In her drive to turn around this tiny burg, which she says “had been run out of a shoebox,” Pam Pratt affronted Cheryle Apple in the most personal of ways.

Pratt, the brash young mayor, chased Apple’s daughter from her job as city manager. In restructuring the volunteer Fire Department, in which Apple’s husband has served nearly four decades, Pratt removed the chief, who happened to be Apple’s son.

So Apple, the matriarch of one of the oldest families in this city of about 800 people east of San Francisco Bay, adopted a course of action favored by disgruntled Isletonians years before Gray Davis ran for governor. She launched a campaign to recall Pratt -- making the mayor the fifth Isleton leader in a decade to face removal.

“We knew that was the only way to get rid of her,” said Apple, a retired home economics teacher who counts the mayor among her former students. “She can do a heck of a lot of damage in the next three years.”

The Isleton vote, scheduled for July 27, is notable not only because its nastiness dwarfs anything that occurred during the Davis battle, but also because it reveals how tightly the recall option remains woven into California’s DNA.

Although the right to hold recalls has been in the state Constitution for 93 years, many Democratic leaders view it as a passing catastrophe that befalls only politicians who commit grievous acts -- such as Doris Allen, who defied her fellow Republicans in 1995 when she helped the Democrats maintain control of the state Assembly even though they held a minority of seats. Only three other state legislators have ever been recalled.

Some Democratic lawmakers are trying to make recalls harder to mount by enacting new restrictions. A handful of bills have been introduced in the Legislature, but their prospects are uncertain.

Meanwhile, the recall practice continues unabated in the scattered hamlets where it has consistently thrived.

In Northern California, Pacific Lumber Co. bankrolled a recall campaign against the Humboldt County district attorney after he filed a civil fraud case against the firm. He survived the March vote, the most expensive race in county history.

In Plymouth -- a failed gold town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada -- three members of the City Council, including the mayor, were not so fortunate last week, when voters removed them.

The offending officials had incurred the electorate’s displeasure by striking a deal with an Indian tribe to build a casino. It didn’t help that Plymouth’s mayor had been arrested in March on suspicion of assaulting her husband with a bag of shoes and was pictured in the local newspaper in shackles and a striped orange prison jumpsuit.

“Most of the successful recalls are done in places like Isleton,” said Ted Costa, a Sacramento activist who launched the Davis recall. “They are used in the cow counties, where everybody knows everybody and where word-of-mouth campaigning goes on.”

A once-thriving agricultural city now best known for its annual crawdad festival, Isleton squats below water level in the delta -- one of California’s most fertile regions, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers widen into a maze of canals. In this town of only 451 registered voters, recall campaigns break through the political levees with unpredictable ferocity.

In 1994, three council members were twice the subjects of recall petitions. Among other things, they were accused of having brought the city near bankruptcy, “with employees being disposed of with no warning.” One council member was charged with exhibiting arrogance and disregard for citizens; another was accused of falling asleep during council meetings and then having “to ask what item they are on when asked to vote.”

The three survived, and, in a particularly savory turn, one of the recall’s chief sponsors was himself recalled in 1996, after he had been elected to the City Council.

Pratt, the current recall target, is a 35-year-old former construction worker and PTA president with long blond feathered hair. Since she became Isleton’s unpaid mayor in 2002, Pratt has dodged one recall effort that fizzled after petitioners filled out the paperwork incorrectly. The subsequent recall effort, launched in January with the help of relatives of Dean Dockery, Pratt’s current fire chief and a member of another old Isleton family, yielded 180 valid signatures, 52 more than necessary.

Though the official petition charges that Pratt “is systematically dismantling the city of Isleton in favor of developers,” both sides agree that the motivation comes from the changes Pratt has made to Isleton’s government.

She laid off eight reserve police officers and installed as chief the head of security for a nearby school district, who accepted a salary of $26 a year. (He initially accepted $1 a year, but that amount proved too complicated for the city’s payroll office to process biweekly, requiring the raise.)

Pratt also gave him authority over the Fire Department, and began limiting how the volunteers could use the fire station for social events. Beer was banned.

Pratt’s defenders praise her for following through on projects that had been stalled for years, many of them in the bureaucratic swamp of grant-giving federal agencies. Pratt has secured money to help improve Isleton’s waterfront, and pushed along a $2-million sewer upgrade.

But even those successes rankle her critics, who accuse her of self-aggrandizingly dismissing the efforts of previous Isleton officials.

“Don’t demean somebody else just to make yourself feel good,” Apple said. “Don’t act like, ‘Oh, wonderful me, I’ve turned all this around.’ We all did.”

Since Isleton’s latest ouster effort began, the rhetoric has risen above anything heard during the Davis recall. In an interview recently in her home, interspersed with the static of a police scanner, Apple leveled a book’s worth of pejoratives at Pratt, calling her a “drama queen,” “power hungry,” a “liar” and a “micromanager.”

Pratt admits only to being “a little anal” and calls the recall “a crock” that’s “all about power and who’s going to run the city.”

“Our money shouldn’t just be going to a couple of families that live in this town,” she said.

Pratt herself voted to hold the recall, even though she disagrees with the practice. She identifies not with Davis but with the movie star who replaced him: “I’d like to see Arnold [Schwarzenegger] come down here, see what I’m dealing with, because I think he’s dealing with the same kind of things. People get complacent, start taking things that aren’t theirs.”

So far, the campaign highlights, if they can be called that, include an awkward interaction when the mayor called for emergency medical assistance for her son and the Fire Department, including Chief Hoot Apple, responded. By that point, the degree of defensiveness was so great that afterward some firefighters wondered whether the call had been a ruse to test the department’s response, speculation that offended Pratt.

Though the mayor’s many supporters are angry with recall proponents, they do not criticize the process itself.

“It’s going to open up the opinion of the town as opposed to just the opinion of the Fire Department,” said Bethany Wright, a newcomer to Isleton. “Before, the Fire Department was kind of playing the puppeteer. She’s made it so we can speak our minds without fear of people running us out of town.”

Isleton recalls are common enough that they do not even create a bond among their targets. Leonard Maxey, who escaped recall twice when he was mayor in the 1990s, said Pratt should not be surprised at the venom she received after she allied herself with certain business interests and went “out of her way” to alienate fire and police officers and their friends.

“I’m sorry we’re having to have such an ugly thing happening,” Apple said. “It does seem that for forever there has been somebody in this town who didn’t like what somebody else is doing. But I’m glad our system allows us to remove somebody who shouldn’t be where they are.”