Nearly a year after winning election to the Cotati City Council, George Barich lost his seat Tuesday night after a fiercely fought recall campaign in which he charged his opponents with trying to subvert democracy.
Almost 40% of the city’s 3,986 registered voters voted in Tuesday’s election, which consumed Cotati’s political energies for months, even as it reeled from an ongoing budget crisis.
Of the 1,538 votes that were counted Tuesday night, 65.7% voted to recall Barich, a first-term councilman around whom controversy swirled practically since his arrival on the council.
They came from every spectrum of the Cotati community, recall leader John Moore said of those who voted to turn Barich out of office.
“Whatever their opinions and differences, they came together to restore civility and sanity and respect to the council,” he said.
Barich did not return phone calls seeking comment.
A small number of absentee ballots that were carried to the polls remain to be counted, county elections officials said Tuesday.
Barich, who ran for the council four times before being elected by a five-vote margin last year, will be replaced by Susan Harvey, a planning commissioner.
A 31-year Cotati resident, Harvey campaigned on a platform of maintaining city services in the face of a worsening economy, and also called for a line-by-line budget analysis to find possible savings.
“I’m going to work hard for the city and prove to the citizens that they made the right choice this time,” said Harvey, a former information technology manager who ran unsuccessfully for the council in 2008. She garnered 730 of the votes counted Tuesday.
Two other candidates to replace Barich, Planning Commissioner Linell Hardy and English teacher and school board member Eric Kirchmann trailed Harvey with 339 and 193 votes, respectively.
Procedurally, Barich will take the council dais once more — when the council will have to adopt a resolution declaring the election’s result.
The County Clerk’s office has to certify the results first, and the Cotati Council will likely be presented with those results at its next meeting on Nov. 25.
“We’re expecting to have the results in time to present them to council on the 25th,” said Deputy City Clerk Tamara Taylor.
Harvey is also to be sworn in at that meeting. She will take a seat on a council dais that has been riven by controversy and personal animosity in recent months, as the bitterly fought recall election washed over into city business.
The antipathies were particularly pronounced between Barich and Vice-Mayor Robert Coleman-Senghor, a target of Barich supporters who said he was behaving unethically by campaigning for the recall and publicly criticizing Barich.
Harvey hopes that a more unified council will now be able to turn its attention to pressing budget issues.
“It’s all about working together to find those solutions and I think we now have a good team in place that can work great together,” she said.
Barich came under fire almost immediately after taking office when he used city letterhead without permission to write to President Barack Obama, criticizing the federal stimulus package.
He went on to fight with city administrators about using the city’s seal on his personal website. His posting on the website of a photograph of himself in blackface and an Afro wig over a version of the seal was the match that lit the recall fire.
He also infuriated opponents by voting against a measure that would have declared a fiscal emergency in the cash-strapped city, effectively preventing the council from considering a sales tax measure to raise money.
The three-month recall campaign was divisive even by the standards of Cotati, a city of 7,100 where political passions run deep.
“It was ugly. It was a very ugly campaign,” said Michael Sheehan, a Cotati native who opposed the recall.
“I think part of that was because this is a small town and people really know each other,” he said. “It was really sad to see.”
Sheehan said he voted against the recall because nothing Barich had done merited such a step.
Barich and his supporters said his opponents represented a minority of sore losers who didn’t want him elected and who then, disagreeing with his positions, sought to overturn the results of a fair election.
Harvey will also join a council whose future remains somewhat unsettled despite Tuesday’s vote.
The five-member body remains one short since former Mayor John Guardino resigned last month. The council is to interview nominees and applicants to the position tonight.
If they cannot agree on a replacement for Guardino, they will have to call for a special election, City Manager Dianne Thompson said.
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