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With the City Clerk's office caveat that the number of challenged [invalid] recall petition signatures may change as multiple employees will eventually review them before making a final determination, the City Clerk's office says that as of June 1 it has checked 53.4% of petitions submitted seeking to recall 2nd district Councilwoman Jeannine Pearce...of which 45.9% are currently considered valid.

Of 4,833 signatures checked out of 9,050 submitted, the City Clerk's office says 2,220 have been deemed valid. (2,018 were deemed invalid based on individuals not registered or signers out of the district; 20 signers cancelled their signatures.)

Since triggering a recall requires 6,363 valid signatures, 4,143 more valid signatures are required...but only 4,217 petitions remain to be checked. To reach the recall trigger figure, the remainder would have to be roughly 98% valid.

The process of checking signatures will continue, but based on our unofficial calculation (and while mindful of Yogi Berra's axion that "it ain't over till it's over"), it appears to us that 2nd dist. Councilwoman Pearce has dodged the recall.

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The effort to recall Pearce had financial support from hotel/hospitality industry interests (displeased by Pearce's history of organizing hotel workers) while fueled at a grassroots level by public anger over a series actions involving Pearce that resulted in her May 22, 2018 City Council censure (8-0 vote, coverage here.)

Based on early petition signature verification numbers last week, Ian Patton (speaking for the recall proponents) told LBREPORT.com in pertinent part:

...[A]s with all petition campaigns in California -- including the recently submitted Long Beach hotel ordinance petition -- the vast lion's share of signatures are collected by paid signature gatherers. The paid signature program for the recall was handled not by our campaign directly but rather by our partner committee, Friends of Long Beach.

What I can say is that the last batch of a couple thousand signatures we received from the partner committee's paid program came in to us the night before our turn-in, so there was no time for us to independently verify the validity rate of that batch of signatures. And there was another batch of approximately 2,000 signatures, which we were waiting for during the course of the turn-in day, May 9th, which never arrived...

In the 2016 election cycle, three candidates (Eric Gray, Joen Garnica, and Jeannine Pearce) entered the race to succeed outgoing 2nd dist. Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal. Pearce and Gray advanced to a June 2016 runoff. Lowenthal endorsed Pearce who also had support from organized labor and a number of self-described "progressive" policy advocacy groups. Her runoff opponent, Eric Gray, was supported by much of LB's establishment and business community. In a hard fought runoff, Pearce prevailed with 51.45% of the vote.

Pearce's recall problems began after a June, 2017 2 a.m.-hour chain of events involving Pearce and her then-former Chief of Staff. Pearce wasn't arrested or criminally charged (DUI or domestic violence) but the circumstances brought to light a Council office relationship that included some type of exit/settlement agreement on terms not publicly disclosed between City and her former Chief of Staff that angered residents who questioned Pearce's fitness to remain in office.

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The recall effort gained support from hotel and business interests already at odds with Pearce on policy matters coupled with property owners distrustful of her, in part because of her visible political alliances, despite her 2016 election campaign-recited opposition to rent control.

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