Recall papers are circulating in the Orange County Registrar of Voters for three Orange County, California, supervisors, and the leader behind the recall says the final two will be filed shortly.
We the People OC said it’s attempting to recall all five Orange County supervisors over lack of transparency, egregious spending of taxpayer dollars, and an unconstitutional vaccine passport.
Petitions for Supervisors Andrew Do and Doug Chaffee are currently in their draft phase, according to the Registrar’s office. Once the proposed petitions are approved, recall proponents will be able to start gathering signatures.
For Supervisor Katrina Foley, the notice of intention to recall was submitted July 6 by We the People OC. Foley has until July 13 to send a response to the recall, the registrar’s office told The Epoch Times. After that date, recall proponents will have 10 days to submit proof of notice in a newspaper of the recall and submit the petition to the registrar’s office.
A clerical error was made when gathering signatures on the intent to recall petitions of Supervisors Don Wagner and Lisa Bartlett. We the People OC said it is currently regathering those signatures and will be resubmitting its paperwork July 13.
“We are taking them all down,” Brian Isley, founder of We the People OC, told The Epoch Times. “We don’t care if they’re Republican or Democrat, totally irrelevant to us. ... We are doing it because of the fact that they have absolutely and totally ignored their constituents.”
One main driver of the recall relates to Orange County’s previous plans to implement a vaccine passport system. Later referred to as a vaccine verification system, recall proponents said the plan was unconstitutional and would segregate people based on vaccination status.
Supervisors have since paused efforts on the system, but Isley said that wasn’t enough.
“What happened was there were 760 people lined up to speak against the vaccine passport, so they just said, ‘We’re going to table it,’” Isley said. “Tabling it is not anything other than we’re cutting off the discussion” from the public.
Isley also accused supervisors of egregious spending and a lack of transparency surrounding budgetary decisions.
“Our county budget in 2019 was $6.2 billion. The budget that they just proposed was $7.7 billion. In one-and-a-half years, they’re increasing the spending of our county by $1.5 billion,” he said.
“We had all this money come in [from the federal government for COVID], where did it go?
“That CARES Act money was supposed to be for two purposes. It was supposed to be for small businesses and for health and human services. They gave $78 million to small businesses out of $554 million, so that’s about 18 percent. Except we have no accounting for where that money actually went. I know at least 200 small business owners, and not one of us got one penny.”
The offices of supervisors Do and Foley didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times; Chaffee’s office declined to comment.
Wagner told The Epoch Times he doesn’t believe the recall will go anywhere.
“There’s an effort to recall all five of us,” he said. “I frankly don’t think it goes anywhere. I think it is based on the misunderstandings about what the board was trying to do with respect to the vaccines and the rollout of the vaccines and the forced vaccinations, none of which are happening, none of which are true. And so I don’t expect that recall effort get a whole lot of traction, but it is out there.”
Wagner also said the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom gets the idea of recall in peoples’ minds regardless of whether it’s warranted against the board of supervisors.
“People are just fed up,” he said. “There’s disinformation ... going after the board about things we aren’t really trying to do that they think we’re trying to do. The natural answer is, ‘Let’s just recall them.’”
