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As promised, I am, at long last, delivering a Q & A I did with Council Member Joe Mosca. We talked on Saturday, February 24, nearly a week after he was served with papers that notified him of an intent to recall him.

To view a copy of the intent-to-recall papers, click here.

To view the press release about Mosca’s official response to the papers, click here.

The following is the first part of a transcript of the conversation, edited for normal conversational glitches. It is a long interview, so I decided to present it in two parts. What follows is the first part, and I’ll run the second part on Monday, March 19.

inSierraMadre.com: Tell me what happened last Sunday [February 18].

Joe Mosca: I was going down to my office time at 2 PM, my regular office time down at Kersting Court. I went for a coffee at Bean Town. A lady came up to me with an envelope, and she said hi. She went to hand me the envelope, and I said, “Hi. How are you?” She said, “Good, but you won’t like the news.” I said OK, and she handed me envelope and walked away. I opened up the envelope, and it was a notice of intent to circulate a recall petition. I read it for a second and gathered my stuff back up. She and her husband were ordering ice cream, and I went over there. I said thank you and introduced myself to her husband David and then left. Her name is Leslee Hinton. She’s the last signature, number 31 or 30 on the notice. … So I took it, went down to Kersting Court and did my office time and then just went on with the day.

inSM: Now, about a couple of technicalities dealing with recall. Why, on the recall papers, is there one name that is duplicated twice?

JM: You only need 30 names, and they have 31. Two appear to be the same. I don’t know if she was more intense in wanting me recalled, and that’s why she signed it twice, (laughing) but it’s two times. And I think that they have 30 signatures.

inSM: They have 31, so if you eliminate the person who signed twice?

JM: Right.

inSM: How is that number, 30, established? In any community would it be 30?

JM: I think that it’s established by election laws. I think that in our community, for this type of process there is a minimum of 30 signatures. We have recently hired an elections attorney to look at all this stuff, so he’s looking at it and will determine whether or not it’s proper. It appears at this point that their notice is proper. There is no mandatory [type of] form that has to be filed with the city clerk. Certain factors have to be present in the notice, and they have included all [the requirements].

Based on some of my conversations with people, I thought, “Is there a standard for recall?” Looking through the record, there really is no standard. There is a lot of information about why recall was first put into place back in the early 1900s. It was basically for corruption and to break the hold of some of these politicians who were put into office by some of the railroad companies. … But there is no standard. So, you can say, “I don’t like the way he walked my dog,” or “I don’t like the way he looks,” and that is sufficient.

That is, essentially, what [the people intending to recall me have] done in their statement. They’ve said information that I think is incorrect. They’ve said that I don’t support a public vote of the Downtown Specific Plan and that in not supporting it I’ve created a situation that is divisive and in their words “shattered the charm of our community.”

I supported a public vote of the downtown plan, and I still support a public vote. The downtown plan was never finished and when Council Member Zimmerman introduced the resolution to put it to a public vote, it hadn’t been finished yet. We hadn’t even gone through the process to determine what would be the document. … There wasn’t any kind of environmental report done.

So I didn’t vote for that, but what I did do was introduce a resolution that essentially brought the document through the process of completing it. The resolution called for more public input and also a public vote at the end of the process when the document was complete. It was important to have a process whereby we put this document together because the draft that was released originally was not something I agreed with and that most Sierra Madreans didn’t agree with, because it just wasn’t what we wanted to see our downtown look like.

So, it was important for all of us to come together, those who agreed with the draft and those who didn’t. Come together and work out a consensus document, something that would work for us. That’s what we are attempting to do, and I think that’s what my resolution did. It was supported by all the Council; it was a 5-0 vote. At the end it would go through a public vote. I think it’s incorrect for them to say that I don’t support a public vote. I do support a public vote. The draft downtown plan has never been finished.

inSM: The resolution you speak of, the one that was the 5-0 vote, when was that, for people who want to go back and do some reading?

JM: It’s available on the website, www.cityofsierramadre.com. There are a number of documents about the draft downtown plan, and one of the documents is the resolution, the timeline that was adopted.

inSM: I was at the meeting you spoke of, not about the timeline, but a previous one where there was the discussion about having a vote about the DSP. … When the vote finished, somebody [in the audience] mumbled something about recall. … I was confused because you were saying the same thing at that meeting that you were saying in your campaign. For Sierra Madreans who aren’t clear on what the problem is, can you elaborate?

JM: The prior City Council had undertaken putting together the DSP because the zoning laws in the downtown are over five decades old. We have several property owners in the downtown who want to develop their parcel. So [they had to take requests] on a case-by-case type of zoning. [They] would look at the entire downtown and try to understand the vision for the downtown. What do we want our downtown to look like? [So, they started the DSP to] make sure that our zoning and all of our regulations in the downtown encourage that vision.

The draft that was released was not something that represented our values, and so I advocated that we change the draft significantly. During the election, I got a lot of support from people who were not happy with the draft. I wasn’t happy either because it was a draft that didn’t make sense, and people wanted to have a public vote on it. And I said, absolutely I would support a public vote, and I still support a public vote.

But I also thought that this is a document that could be changed and could eventually be something that made sense for our city and work for our city. So my feelings were, “Let’s take this document that the city had spent a lot of money on, and a lot of time on. Let’s move forward with it, and let’s create a document that we can all live with and a document that’s going to represent our best interests.”

Looking back, I guess that there are some people that just wanted to kill [the DSP] and never wanted to move forward with it at all. So some of those people may have been thinking that I was somebody who was just going to kill the document, whereas I was saying, let’s bring this document forward, let’s work with it, let’s try to change it, let’s try to make it something that we can live with, something that’s going to help us in our downtown. And then, we’ll put it out to a vote.

inSM: So for people who are either new to Sierra Madre or who haven’t been following, they’re going to see in the headlines that there is a recall, and if they want to get informed, what’s the best thing that they can do?

JM: They can contact me by e-mailing me or calling me at my telephone number, or they can go to www.joemosca.com and get more information. We can get them more information. If they e-mail me, I can get them information right away about the recall.

inSM: Should they go to the city website as well?

JM: They can research all the issues about the downtown plan on the website.

inSM: Is there any way, that you know of … that people can go back and watch old City Council meetings?

JM: The library should have all the tapes there. … or Debra Humphrey, the assistant to the City Manager, would probably have transcripts also.

inSM: There’s a mailing that went out on a yellow sheet of paper. I received it today, Saturday, February 24. It’s essentially an anti-SMRRD, anti-2-30-13, anti-Measure V flier. It says on there that Council Member Kurt Zimmerman is actively working to recall three City Council members. Do you know about that? … Is this a fact? … Is he behind your recall?

JM: I don’t know. … This is the first time I’ve seen this [flier]. If it was mailed to everybody, then it would have been mailed to me, but I haven’t checked my mailbox today. I’ve just been in meetings. I don’t know what Kurt’s involvement is with my recall, nor do I know his intentions with respect to any other recall.

inSM: The recall papers say that you are breaking campaign promises. You say you still support a vote of the Downtown Specific Plan, but you are just saying that you’re supporting it at a different time than maybe some of the other council members do. For Sierra Madreans who are wondering, then, why people would want to mount a recall when you’ve said publicly that you’re still for the same things that you were, what’s the problem then? Why do people want to recall you?

JM: It’s not just about the time. … We hadn’t even begun any conversations on the draft DSP. During the campaign I had said that I didn’t think that the draft downtown plan represented our interests as something that would fit within our community. So I was very anxious and very much looking forward to a debate about the downtown plan and also a process that would allow us to complete the downtown plan with much more input and eventually a document that made sense for the community.

[When Council Member Zimmerman proposed the vote] we weren’t there. We hadn’t even gone through the process … [The draft was] nothing that I would even go out and support, so why would I vote to put something on a ballot when I’m not even willing to support it myself? What I supported was a process, having some hope that this document could eventually turn into a document that would make sense for our community. That’s what I supported. Going through the process to put that together, get the environmental studies together, find out everything, and then, at the end, put it to a public vote if it eventually made it to the point where it could be a consensus document and we could all support it. At least the bulk of us could support this document and say, “This is a good document, vote for it.” Then I would support putting it out on the ballot. If it’s something that we could never get together and never get consensus with, then it’s not going to go any further. It’s just going to die. I’m not going to spend money out of the city’s coffers to put something on the ballot that doesn’t make sense at all.

I don’t know why [people want to recall me]. I suspect that some people who are pushing for this recall had a very strong feeling about the draft downtown plan and strongly opposed it and felt like this process is never going to produce something that’s going to be beneficial for our community, and maybe they thought that that’s something that I stood for. And I thought that I was very clear throughout the campaign that I didn’t think that the draft made sense and that I support a public vote, and that’s where I still am.

Right now, I would love to be working on putting together zoning laws for our commercial zone in our downtown that make sense for our downtown. Instead we’re focusing on issues of personality and all this other stuff that just doesn’t make sense. Certainly you can disagree with me. You can say, “Joe didn’t vote this way,” or “Joe voted this way,” and, “I agree with him,” or, “I disagree with him.”

Recall is not a mechanism to deal with a difference in opinion. This is simply a difference in opinion and is not something that is so extreme that you’d want to use recall. Recall is a divisive tool. It will divert our attention from the important issues in Sierra Madre for a long time, and it’s very personal. It’s not something that should be used except in limited cases when it is absolutely necessary. And this is not it.

Check back on Monday, March 19 for the second part of this interview.