Group pressing for election to remove Raleigh mayor from office

Enraged over various actions taken by the Raleigh City Council, including a push to delay local elections by a year, an activist group is calling for a recall election to remove Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin from office.

Posted 6:22 p.m. Jul 16, 2021 — Updated 12:09 a.m. Jul 17, 2021

Matthew Burns

, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor

RALEIGH, N.C. — Enraged over various actions taken by the Raleigh City Council, including a push to delay local elections by a year, an activist group is calling for a recall election to remove Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin from office.

Livable Raleigh plans a 3 p.m. Saturday meeting at John Chavis Memorial Park to drum up support for a petition to hold a recall election. Under the city's charter, the petition must be signed by at least 13,745 registered voters, which would equal 25 percent of the number who cast votes in Raleigh's last election in 2019.

Baldwin declined to comment on the recall effort.

"North Carolina’s top election authorities agree that what the Raleigh City Council did was wrong. Let’s put Raleigh‘s elections back in the hands of the voters," Livable Raleigh posted on its website.

The organization is referring to a new state law allowing Raleigh to delay the elections set for this October until November 2022.

Because of delays with census data needed to redraw voting districts, state lawmakers agreed to push elections in dozens of cities across North Carolina until next March, when the statewide primaries are held. But the Raleigh City Council met behind closed doors to draft a resolution that was then presented to local House members to get a special provision inserted into the legislation pushing Raleigh's elections back an additional eight months.

Baldwin has previously said the extra time is needed because Raleigh has grown so much in the past decade that it will take time to go through the census data and redraw the City Council's five single-member districts.

The legislation also would eliminate all runoff elections in Raleigh and permanently shift the elections to even-numbered years, to be held with statewide elections. Wake County's five state senators and Gov. Roy Cooper criticized the bill, saying the public wasn't given a chance to weigh in on the changes.

"Livable Raleigh is going to do what City Council refused to do: Hold a public meeting. Gather public input. And discuss in public the opportunity to hold a timely election using Raleigh’s recall ordinance," the group posted on its website.

The organization considered pushing to recall all seven City Council members as well but deemed it impractical, given the petition rules, said Susan Maruyama, Livable Raleigh's chairwoman.

"We felt the biggest change we could make to affect Raleigh is to change the leadership," Maruyama said. "If we change the leadership, maybe we can change the direction city governance is going in."

Livable Raleigh formed in late 2019, but because of the pandemic, Saturday's meeting will be the first in-person event the group has hosted. Several Zoom meetings have attracted hundreds of Raleigh residents over the past year, eager to get more information about what's going on in city government, Maruyama said.

"Our focus is information, education and engagement," she said.

In addition to the delayed elections, the organization is upset over the City Council's decision to dissolve Citizen Advisory Committees in early 2020. The website features both a countdown clock until the November 2022 elections and a counter showing the number of days since the CACs, which provided neighborhood input to city officials on zoning issues and other matters for decades, were disbanded.

Baldwin said at that time that the city was seeking a more effective way to engage a wider cross-section of residents than the CACs provided.

"Mayor Baldwin and the Raleigh City Council have consistently removed the public from due process and denied them input on city issues that directly affect their lives and well-being," Livable Raleigh said in a recent news release.

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