With recall effort to oust Mayor Tim Elinski now dead, Cottonwood can move on

The signatures for the potential Cottonwood recall election have been verified, and the petitioners have come up short by about 40 signatures fewer than they needed to trigger a recall of current Mayor Tim Elinski.

Regardless of how you may feel about the recall effort, or Elinski personally or his policies, it should be a great relief to taxpayers that the city of Cottonwood will not be wasting taxpayer dollars on a recall election three months before the regular election — an election in which Elinski has indicated he will not be running to retain his seat anyway.

With Elinski set to leave in November at the end of his current term, trying to oust him early seems rather silly. It’s not as though he could do such outrageous damage to the city in those last three months, considering he’s been on council for over 15 years.

All of this stemmed from an application back in February by a group of Phoenix-area performers who wanted to host a drag show in April at the Cottonwood Community Clubhouse in Old Town. For well over a decade, such performances have been conducted by Sedona-Verde Valley Pride at both public and private venues, including the Cottonwood Activity Park imme­diately behind the clubhouse. They have been held for far longer and more often at bars around Cottonwood and elsewhere in the Verde Valley.

As an art form, drag is not for everyone, but neither is ballet, slam poetry, jazz, country music or Gregorian chant. But Cottonwood, Arizona and the West have a very robust live-and-let-live ethos that underlies our culture, so we are willing to let others do what they want as long it doesn’t harm anyone else. Many of the most vocal oppo­nents of ideas here are relatively new transplants from other regions of the country who have yet to learn how Arizona does things.

This year appeared to be no different, except that folks were spurred on by social media, or cable news political pundits, or local activists to view the regular performance as somehow newly evil. It seems as though it was an activity no one found fault with until talking heads called it sinful, the newest moral panic. The whole enterprise got progressively more absurd as time went on.

Approving the drag show was a matter of a ministe­rial function of filling out paperwork and filing it with the city, like filing for a business license or requesting a park ramada for a birthday party, not a legislative act by council or the mayor, so targeting Elinski for an act he had no hand in seemed ridiculous at the outset. Even if the town had rejected the drag show or imposed some sort of a ban on drag performances, it would likely face a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, as last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the state of Florida demonstrated.

Councilwoman Lisa DuVarney claimed repeatedly that Elinski violated the law by not placing the item on the agenda, but still has neither filed a formal criminal or civil complaint with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office nor provided us with her evidence of his alleged behavior in spite of our requests to do so.

If the petitioners were serious, they should have targeted for recall all seven members of council, as they are the legislative body controlling the city. But the petition’s organizers seemed to be unclear about how municipal government works. Likewise, they appear to have lacked an understanding of how the petition process works, considering that 28% of those who signed were not legal electors under state law, and many were ineligible to sign based simply on their addresses outside the city. The responsibility for this falls on those who collected names, not those who signed.

We have covered several successful recalls in years past, as well as referendums filed against local councils for various decisions, and rarely has such a large percentage of signatures ever been thrown out simply based on resi­dency or eligibility to vote.

Based on social media comments, some signers were motivated not by the drag show but by Elinski’s decision during the COVID-19 pandemic to impose a mask ordi­nance against the wishes of council, which had voted 4-3 against such a decision.

Few voters were so perturbed by either of these actions that they were willing to recall their mayor — in a city of 12,029 residents, only 599 voters felt so aggrieved that they were willing to say the mayor met the threshold to be ousted.

With all this now behind us, residents in general and supporters of drag shows specifically who believe that the city is one that values cultural openness, art, free expression, equality and protection of minorities can have their faith rewarded that the overwhelming majority of the city believes the same.

This suggests that in the upcoming 2024 Cottonwood municipal election, candidates who run against drag shows or on an anti-LGBTQ platform will not win votes. Residents have bigger concerns, like controlling growth, inflation, housing shortages, future water use and boosting the economy.