The push to recall Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is based on a policy disagreement, not a violation of any law or standard, and the petitioners leading the recall haven’t identified what steps Durkan should have taken in the wake of June’s widespread protests, Durkan argued in appealing her case to the state Supreme Court.
Durkan’s argument, filed Monday, reprises some of the arguments she made in King County Superior Court, where a judge ruled that the recall effort could move forward, but also adds some new ones.
“Following the most widespread civil unrest Seattle has seen in decades, Petitioners submitted, and the trial court approved, a charge that Mayor Durkan ‘failed to institute new policies and safety measures for the Seattle Police Department’ with regard to the use of chemical crowd control measures,” Durkan’s attorneys, Rebecca Roe and William Shaw, write in the appeal. “Remarkably, neither Petitioners nor the trial court identified the particular ‘policies and safety measures’ Mayor Durkan had a duty to implement, but failed to enact.”
“There is no evidence that any discretionary decision Mayor Durkan made in the midst of multiple ongoing civil emergencies was manifestly unreasonable,” Roe and Shaw write.
Allowing the recall to proceed, would “chill the discretionary authority of public officials across the political spectrum,” they wrote.
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