GREENFIELD — The attempt to recall Precinct 1 City Councilor Verne Sund has been halted following a technicality in the process.
The first step to attempting to remove Sund from office was submitted two weeks ago to the City Clerk’s Office, but on Thursday City Attorney Gordon Quinn ruled the recall affidavit was invalid. The 100 signatures collected were not signed under the penalties of perjury.
Quinn said while additional legal opinions are being explored by At-Large Councilor Isaac Mass, the city’s attorney was confident that petition as is was not valid.
“We wanted to provide you with this opinion first because the threshold question of the validity of the ‘Recall Affidavit’ documents should be promptly brought to the attention of the people who filed these documents,” Quinn said in a letter to the Greenfield City Council and City Clerk’s Office.
From the get-go there have been questions of whether the recall can be completed in time to comply with the process laid out in the city charter. Sund, who is serving the final year of his three-year term, cannot be recalled if it’s within the final six months of his term. If these 100 signatures were valid, the next step for the organizers would have been to collect 2,346 voter signatures within 21 days — 20 percent of the total registered voters on the rolls in the last townwide election.
The recall stated Sund is unfit to serve his constituents on three main counts: multiple public remarks the petition calls discrimination against protected classes of citizens; failure to respond to hundreds of official emails and phone calls; and lost confidence that he is fit for office.
When Precinct 1 resident and recall organizer Katherine Golub submitted the recall on Feb. 15, she said: “Time and again, Councilor Sund has made comments that are hurtful to the most vulnerable members of our community.”
Sund said he had heard the news on Friday.
“I’ll just let it ride and go about my Town Council business,” Sund said. “I got a job to do for the whole town as well as my own precinct.”
“This is an obstruction of citizen democracy,” Golub said in a statement Friday afternoon. “Nowhere in the charter does it say that the signatures need to be certified. We continue to feel strongly about our mission and are contemplating next steps.”
Fellow organizer Patty Morey Walker, a former candidate for mayor, said the recall effort is about Sund’s words, which have on multiple occasions have caused a stir in the community.
The petition affidavit points to three instances in which Sund made “discriminatory remarks towards protected classes of Greenfield citizens.”
It points to the Safe City vote in August 2017, when he “referred to his black neighbors as ‘colored’ before voting against designating Greenfield” a safe city. He has apologized publicly multiple times for those remarks, stating he used a term that was OK when he was younger, but didn’t understand that it is not generally accepted in society today. In September 2017, Sund, pushing against a proposed needle exchange program, said people with addiction problems need to be disciplined, “like when you are (a) child and did something wrong, ‘you get a good spanking.’”
And the affidavit points to his most recent remarks that upset some residents. During the December City Council meeting, Sund said, “I’ve seen different parts of the world that have libraries like this and they got people in wheelchairs and stuff like that, but they go and get there. If they want to read a book, no matter whether they’re disabled or not, they go on and get there.”
Sund has not yet said whether he will run for re-election this November.
jsolomon@recorder.com
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