LOS ANGELES (CNS) - An effort to recall Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ended today, the petition leaders said, after it failed to gather enough signatures to place the question of removing him on the 2020 ballot.
``Today, the Committee to Recall Mayor Eric Garcetti is announcing we will not be submitting a petition to the Los Angeles City Clerk's Office, as we were not able to gather enough signatures to be considered for certification,'' Alexandra Datig, the committee's leader, said in a statement.
The recall effort needed 316,000 signatures from Los Angeles residents to be considered for the ballot. Online, which does not count toward the official total, 50,000 people signed that petition at Change.org.
``The battle against recalling the mayor of Los Angeles, who has been falling short on his promises to end homelessness ... cannot be won,'' Datig said. ``There simply exists no reasonable process by which a citizen-, volunteer-driven effort can succeed.''
Datig said one of the reasons they were unsuccessful is because of how much it costs for a recall effort in Los Angeles, which she said is designed to fail the citizens, and said she may file an ethics complaint with the city because of that.
She also blamed the timing of the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, saying they ``drowned out our effort.''
``But we carried out our commitment to the citizens of Los Angeles and took this effort to the last day to honor those who suffer on our streets,'' Datig said.
Garcetti responded to the recall effort at the Unified Homelessness Response Center in downtown Los Angeles, where he was speaking about new programs that are intended to help homeless people.
``I welcome folks to the actual hard work and the fight of the things that they were talking about to join us and actually be a part of solving the challenges that we face in Los Angeles,'' Garcetti said. ``It (the recall effort) was a lot of political posture, is kind of how I saw it, and I think the results will speak for themselves.''
Datig first announced her intent to form a committee to recall the mayor last June, when the county's 2019 homeless count showed the unhoused population had surged 16% in the city of Los Angeles, with more than 36,000 people without a home. Los Angeles County shot up 12% to nearly 59,000 homeless people.
The statement from Datig also criticized the city's use of the $1.2 billion in Proposition HHH funding and that it hasn't housed people fast enough.
``I have lived in Los Angeles for 33 years,'' Datig said. ``My own father, who was a wealthy businessman at one point in his life, was also a combat-wounded World War II veteran whose scars of war took him to the streets for nearly two years.''