Well, it really happened. Solvang’s voters will get the chance to recall City Councilmember Chris Djernaes on Nov. 3.
More than 25 percent of the city’s registered voters signed the petition, so neither the city nor Santa Barbara County has a choice but to put it on the ballot. The people have spoken!
Lammy Johnstone, one of the leaders of the recall petition effort, spoke during a July 27 City Council meeting, saying she was sorry that the situation had come to this. More of a “sorry, not sorry!” than an actual apology.
“Let this be a lesson to any council member or mayor!” she threatened. “Your job, as I look at it, is to represent us. If you do not, we will remove you.”
Whoo! So are other City Council members next? What about Mayor Ryan Toussaint? They basically voted together on most of the decisions the city has made over the last couple of years.
“It’s a wake-up call for everybody here in the city. We are ‘We the People.’ Thank you. Bye, bye!” Johnstone said.
Yeah. Bye, Felicia! I mean: Bye, Chris!
Or is it really like Mayor Pro Tem Robert Clarke said? People are just pissed off at the way Djernaes speaks to the public.
“He talks back to people and I thought, if you recall every ass that’s ever served in public office, there wouldn’t be a lot of people in public office,” Clarke said.
Well maybe we should recall every ass who serves in public office, Clarke, my boy. Maybe then, people wouldn’t treat each other the way they do now or get so angry. Maybe then, people could actually engage in a civil discussion about the best way to serve the public and create public policy. Maybe then, Clarke would be the next ass on the recall list!
Bye, Clarke! Sorry not sorry!
If the Environmental Defense Center had its way, we would throw and oil industry recall on the ballot. Man, do they hate the oil industry! They are positively rejoicing at the fact that 140 people are going to lose their jobs in 2023 when the Santa Maria oil refinery on the Nipomo Mesa shuts down.
Phillips 66 announced the closure on Aug. 12 in the same press release that it announced it was also going to shut down its crude oil pipelines and turn its refinery in San Francisco into a renewable fuel plant. The big news left pretty much every oil company operating in Santa Barbara County with a big fat question mark in front of it.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Center used it as an opportunity to double down.
“This is great news for California communities, motorists, and wildlife threatened by ExxonMobil’s dangerous oil trucking plan. Exxon should follow Phillips 66’s lead and end its dirty energy operations on the Central Coast,” the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kristen Monsell said in an Environmental Defense Center press release.
Yeah! Let’s get rid of all the oil in this county. It’s dirty, disgusting!
But guess what? Santa Barbara County doesn’t have a replacement. For neither the energy nor the jobs. And so far, none of the renewable energy projects proposed in recent history have become a reality.
The canary is thinking of renewable bird poop as a good alternative to oil. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2020.