Effort to recall Bannock County Commissioners fails to get enough signatures to move forward

The effort to recall the Bannock County commissioners has failed to get enough signatures by the deadline to move the issue to a March ballot.

On Monday, the Pocatello/Bannock County Homeowners’ Alliance announced on their Facebook page that the petitions had been shredded, rather than turned into the Election’s Office.

The recall effort was in response to the property assessment hikes and the Board of Equalization’s response to the debacle.

The Board of Equalization is made up of the three county commissioners, Steve Brown, Ernie Moser and Terrel “Ned” Tovey. The petitioners gathered 8,287 signatures to recall Brown, 7,961 to recall Moser and 8,601 to recall Tovey.

Each petition needed 9,101 signatures to move the issue to a ballot vote in March.

The petitions, like the petition to recall the assessor, were shredded by members of the recall effort to maintain the privacy of people who signed.

“Every one of you made a difference and I think that rather than looking at this as a negative, the positive is that we made people aware of what is going on in our local government and gave people a voice,” the Facebook post read.

KIFI 2019