Lance MacLean, the embattled mayor of Mission Viejo, said Thursday he is regrouping after losing a recall election held after opponents accused him of "uncivil behavior" and fiscal irresponsibility.
MacLean, a Republican, has five days to request a recount in Tuesday’s election, which ended in a 19-vote difference. With a 23.9% turnout, 7,370 voted to remove MacLean from office, and 7,351 voted against recalling him.
"With all the shenanigans these guys have pulled … but I am clearly leaning toward challenging the vote," MacLean said.
Voters elected local businessman David Leckness, a Democrat, over recall proponent Dale Tyler, a Republican, by 9.2 percentage points.
"I think that we need to thank Lance for a lot of years of service," Leckness said Thursday from the print shop he has run in Mission Viejo for 25 years. "It’s too bad that happened like this, but my job is to keep the city moving in the great direction that it’s been going in."
Recall proponents had criticized MacLean for approving in a 4-1 City Council vote to double his stipend from $500 to $1,000 a month. MacLean said on his website that the council was adjusting the stipend for inflation and cost of living and noted it had remained unchanged for two decades.
MacLean said some of his biggest detractors were once his strongest supporters who helped get him elected to the council in 2002.
"It’s ironic because — and I’m frustrated here — I’ve doubled our reserves from $15 million to $30 million," MacLean said, noting the city’s AAA bond rating, a grade of financial stability bestowed on a handful of U.S. cities.
"What this group wanted to do was pound cash away in the bank," MacLean said. "You collect the tax dollars to provide services, not create a giant bank account."
Recall proponents turned in nearly 14,000 signatures in September, and 9,400 of them were verified. But the efforts of Citizens to Recall Lance MacLean are being investigated by the Orange County district attorney and the state Fair Political Practices Commission, said City Clerk Karen Hamman, who alerted the commission to possible reporting violations.
Councilman John Paul Ledesma, a recall proponent, said the group’s treasurer did not realize he had to provide financial reports on a quarterly basis.
Some residents had balked at the special election’s $270,000 price tag and noted the recall shaves just a few months off MacLean’s term, which was set to end in November.
MacLean’s Republican opponent, Tyler, came under fire in January for not possessing a California driver’s license and for having cars in California that were registered in Indiana, Hamman said. Tyler could not be reached for comment.
But Ledesma said some recall supporters felt "blindsided" by the 11th-hour revelations of Tyler’s lack of a state driver’s license.
"I think some information came out about Dale Tyler that kind of shook confidence in people … but I think Dave Leckness is an improvement over Lance McLean," Ledesma said.
Leckness, who previously served as a city planning commissioner, said during the campaign that the recall election was unnecessary.
"The message we were putting out was ‘Vote no on the recall … but if there is a recall, vote for Dave Leckness,’ " he said. "And that’s what people did."
— Amina Khan