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Recall ballots mailed to voters Central Point effort targets mayor, council By SARA MURPHY CENTRAL POINT -- Claiming a year's worth of rudeness and arrogance, Larry Thornton launched a recall campaign against three city officials that now lies in the hands of the city's voters. Ballots were mailed out Friday to more than 6,600 Central Point voters who will now decide whether to recall Mayor Bill Walton and City Council members Dave Gilmour and Donna Higginbotham. Election day is March 28. Walton, Gilmour and Higginbotham have chosen to contest the recall, saying it has no merit. Thornton, chief petitioner and owner of The Old Center Cafe, believes the three city officials have abused their authority by failing to listen to their constituents. Yet the debate seems to revolve around a more fundamental issue: how elected officials should represent their constituents. "Elected officials have a different view of representation than the people as a whole," says Don Laws, a Southern Oregon University political science professor and longtime member of the Ashland City Council. Laws says some people believe representatives should be agents of the people, acting on their constituents' opinions regardless of their own, while others believe representatives are trustees, making decisions based on what they feel is best for the people. "Elected officials tend to favor the trusteeship theory of representation and the general public tends to favor the agent theory," Laws says. "I guess it's natural that each of us favors the theory that gives us more power." In Central Point, where the academic debate is being played out in a recall campaign, Walton says he doesn't have time to survey citizens on all the issues handled by the City Council. "My schedule is so busy with so many different commitments, to go down and try to solicit from them problems, that's not the way the council operates," he says. Walton says time is set aside for non-agenda items at each council meeting, and that he and the council members are available throughout the week. "I have a listed phone number, I give out my cellular number," he says. Thornton says the few times he addressed the City Council, he didn't feel anyone was listening. "They do whatever they want," he says. "They don't listen." Thornton first attended a City Council meeting on Feb. 4, 1999, speaking on behalf of 60 citizens who signed an informal petition opposing a proposal to change the council's meeting nights from the first and third Thursday of the month to the second and fourth. Walton says the council approved the change because the Medford City Council met the same nights, causing a conflict for council members wanting to attend the Medford meeting as well as with the Central Point council's plan to broadcast its meetings. "We're going to enlarge the chamber, we're going to put movie cameras in so we'll be live on TV," Walton says. "Well, we couldn't have been live on TV meeting the same night as Medford." While the council meetings are not yet on television, the meeting night debate and others have been played out on the Forum page of the Central Point Times weekly newspaper. Thornton says the mayor and two council members targeted by the recall have acted unprofessionally by "attacking" citizens through letters to the editor. "They're not supposed to do that," Thornton says. "They're supposed to be beyond that." The mayor and council members each wrote letters to the editor of the Central Point Times last summer responding to letters written by citizens, including Thornton. More recently, an advertisement paid for by the Committee to Save the Smoke-Free Three accused former Mayor Rusty McGrath of being the driving force behind the recall effort. McGrath, listed as chief petitioner to recall Gilmour, says he lent his name as a favor to Thornton but is not actively involved in the recall effort. "That's all he asked and that's all I done," McGrath says. "There's no bad blood about losing (the election to Walton), no sour grapes." McGrath says he has no plans to run for office again and hadn't planned to run against Walton in November 1998 until he was asked by city staff members. "I just want to be left alone so I can go race my cars," McGrath says. After a year of growing irritation with the City Council, Thornton says, the anti-smoking ordinance it adopted in January was the last straw. "The smoking thing, all it does is add credence to what I've been saying all along," Thornton says. "Enough's enough." The ordinance bans smoking in restaurants and most nonresidential buildings, and hands stiff penalties to store owners who sell tobacco products to minors. Though it was set to go into effect last month, Thornton gathered enough signatures to block the ordinance until voters can decide on the issue in a referendum vote in September. Thornton took out papers for the recall Jan. 13, the same day the City Council held its first reading of the ordinance. Though his cafe is one of a handful of restaurants that would be affected by the ordinance, Thornton says he didn't file the recall in retaliation. "It has to do with the way they went about it," he says. "It helped me rush things through. They were not listening to the people again." Walton says the council made its decision based on statistics that say Central Point citizens would be in favor of making the city smoke-free. "We didn't need to take a poll," he says. "The county health department said 62 percent of the people (with the 664 telephone prefix) want a smoking ordinance. "We voted for it because we knew what the facts were. The public wants it." Walton says that the ordinance is not about fining adults or stopping adults from smoking, but about protecting children. He says the council members knew the ordinance would be controversial. Still, the mayor says, his style of representation isn't just cause for a recall. "The little petty things like this, it distracts so much," he says. "You're putting out bonfires when people say `we're recalling you because of the fact that you're not downtown.' Well, they know my phone number, they know where the office is." 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