CITY OF BUCHANAN COMMISSION RECALL UPDATE

By DEBRA HAIGHT
BCR Correspondent

        BUCHANAN – One of two recall efforts against Buchanan city officials has failed. Berrien County Elections Administrator Kathryn Klemesrud said Thursday that not enough valid signatures were submitted on the petitions asking for the recall of City Commissioner Dan Vigansky.

Recall wording against Vigansky was approved in mid-December and filed March 4. City resident Jacob Brown submitted the wording against Vigansky, quoting Vigansky as saying he always refers to “Blacks, Mexicans and Indians as ‘you people’.”

Vigansky wasn’t the only Buchanan official facing recall. Residents Carla Johnson and Monroe Lemay filed recall wording against Mayor Sean Denison last December over his suspension of then City Manager Benjamin Eldridge last November. They are continuing to collect signatures.

Klemesrud said last week that the recall failed due to a lack of valid signatures. She said 397 signatures were submitted initially and those signatures were reviewed by the County Clerk and her staff and the Buchanan City Clerk. Vigansky also submitted challenges to the petition signatures.

Klemesrud said the end result of all the reviews and challenges was that they found there to be 353 valid signatures which is less than the 380 valid signatures required to put the recall election on the November ballot. She noted that signatures were found to be invalid for a variety of reasons.

The 380 number represents one fourth of the number of Buchanan city residents who voted for governor in the 2022 election.

She confirmed that the Vigansky recall organizers will have to start over if they want to continue to pursue his removal from office. That means they will have to submit new recall wording, have it approved and circulate more petitions to gather signatures.

Vigansky said last week that he was happy to not be facing recall this November. He has always denied the allegations made against him in the recall wording and has said he’s only been guilty of being politically incorrect.

“I didn’t break any law, I’m only guilty of saying things that offend people,” he pointed out last week. “People freaked out when I said ‘kiss my ass’ in a commission meeting.”

Vigansky also took exception to the recall law itself. He called the Michigan law regarding recalls to be insulting and stupid, noting that recall wording doesn’t have to allege an malfeasance or misfeasance.

“Recalls are labor intensive for county and city clerks to go through all the signatures,” he added. “Michigan has more recalls than any other state and 95 percent of them fail although the cost to the taxpayers is a lot.”

Vigansky isn’t the only person to question Michigan recall laws. Those laws actually changed over a decade ago so that there is just one election rather than two if enough valid signatures are submitted and the time period to collect signatures is 60 rather than 90 days.

Previously, there would be two elections if enough valid signatures were collected for a recall. People would first vote on whether an elected official should be recalled and then later vote on who should replace that person.

According to an article late last year in the Detroit Free Press, Michigan is the nation’s leader when it comes to the number of recalls filed the last two years and in second or third place in years before that. They cited the website Ballotpedia for that information.

The article noted that Michigan is also the leader in failed recalls. In the first 10 months of 2023, 126 elected officials were targeted for recall with just six percent actually ousted. The primary reason for the failed recalls was the difficulty in getting enough valid signatures, especially in areas with larger populations.

While the Detroit Free Press article quoted officials and others who don’t see the value of recalls and chalk the rising number to the polarization of the electorate, the www.goodparty.org website had a different take on recalls as they saw them as a tool for governmental accountability.