Effort To Recall LA Mayor Eric Garcetti Fails To Garner Necessary Signatures

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — An effort to recall Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ended Thursday after it failed to garner enough signatures to place the question on the 2020 ballot, petition leaders said.

"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 residents of L.A. to be considered for the ballot. It was not clear how many the official petition received, but an unofficial online Change.org petition had 50,000 signatures.

"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 a number of issues impacted the group's ability to get the required number of signatures, including the cost of a recall effort and the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, which she said "drowned out" the 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 effort to recall him at the Unified Homelessness Response Center downtown Thursday where he introduced new programs to help the city's homeless population.

"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 Garcetti last June, after results of the 2019 homeless count showed the population of those without a home in the city surged to 36,000 — a 16% increase from the year before. The county's population of unhoused residents increased 12% to nearly 59,000. Results from this year's count are expected sometime this summer.

(© Copyright 2020 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. City News Service contributed to this report.)