Recall Takes Aim at Bishop, Leader of Oceanside Council

Melba Bishop, the onetime darling rebel of the Oceanside City Council who has boasted of her grass-roots popularity, has been targeted for recall, just two weeks after she surfaced as the matriarch of the new City Council majority.

Two detractors who filed preliminary recall papers with the Oceanside City Clerk’s office this week called Bishop “an embarrassment to the city” by, among other things, wielding her new political power like a scythe through City Hall’s establishment.

If successful, Bishop’s recall would be the first since 1982--when Bishop led her own successful recall campaign against then-council members Bill Bell and Ray Burgess.

Bishop had served on the council from 1980 to 1984, when she ran unsuccessfully for the mayor’s post, and was elected again to the council in 1988. She now is targeted by two Oceanside residents, Ed Wicburg and Michael Balin, who announced Wednesday their intention to seek her removal from office.

The two men will have about six months to collect the signatures of about 8,400 city voters--15% of the city’s electorate--in order to force a recall election.

“I’m not testing her popularity,” said Wicburg, a businessman involved with property rentals. “I just don’t like what’s happened in the past few weeks, so as a citizen I’m standing up.”

His reference was to the Oceanside City Council meeting Dec. 5, when Bishop and new council members and Bishop allies Nancy York and Don Rodee--at their debut meeting--removed Mayor Larry Bagley and Councilman Sam Williamson from key committee posts and ousted four of the city’s seven planning commissioners.

It added to an already tumultuous City Hall environment in which key city officials--from city manager to redevelopment director to police chief--have resigned in recent weeks.

In the recall notification papers, Wicburg and Balin said Bishop has “arrogantly with malice usurped the authority of the elected mayor in committee appointments, engineering the removal of all citizen committee members who publicly disagree with her.”

They also alleged that Bishop tried to influence the disposition of undetailed “police cases affecting her family members,” and “forced city administrators to employ her son at above-normal starting rates to the detriment of other applicants.”

They also blamed Bishop for costing the city more than $2 million in litigation over the city’s controversial growth management ordinance, of “pretending to favor slow growth,” of delaying the improvements of California 76 through the eastern side of the city, and of “consistently” violating the state’s open-meeting laws by meeting secretly with “her two obedient servants.”

Bishop, 48, denied the charges.

“I know they’re well-meaning, but they’re reacting to the election because they don’t like how it turned out,” she said. “I’ve done nothing to harm this city. I worked to elect two people . . . who can clean up some of the poor practices in the city and get us out of our $5.8 million deficit. That’s given people a lot of fodder.”