Mediaboss Marketing

Save Yamhill County organizers say commissioner's goal was to misdirect voters days before ballots were mailed

Less than a week before ballots began arriving in mailboxes across the county, attorneys for Commissioner Lindsay Berschauer demanded that the organization seeking her recall, Save Yamhill County, retract statements made on the petitions circulated over the past several months. The embattled commissioner's attorneys threatened legal action if the statements were not retracted.

"On the recall petition filed Nov. 18 during subsequent circulation of that petition, and likely in other subsequent communications, you have made numerous allegations about Commissioner Berschauer without providing factual support," attorney Steve Elzinga of the Portland firm Sherman Sherman Johnnie & Hoyt wrote on Feb. 25.

It appears the threat of legal action was without teeth.

"Despite her promise in her March 4 Facebook Live video to bring a lawsuit against Save Yamhill County, chief petitioner Phil Fovre and myself, we have heard nothing further from either the commissioner or her attorney, and don't expect that she will follow through with her threat," Lynette Shaw, the co-petitioner on the recall effort, said in an email. Berschauer defeated Shaw in a 2020 race for Position 2 on the commission.

Shaw dismissed the threatened lawsuit as a political ploy to distract voters from the real issue: Berschauer's fitness for office.

"Instead of answering the concerns of her constituents or talking with the community about what troubled them enough to call for her resignation, the commissioner has, from the very first day the recall was filed, followed a strategy of casting doubt on the recall effort with lies and mischaracterizations and, even more disturbing, making repeated personal attacks on her constituents who have supported her recall. The threatened lawsuit is just more of the same," Shaw said.

Berschauer countered that her intent in threatening a lawsuit was to maintain the integrity of county governance.

"My purposes in pursuing legal action against this fraudulent recall effort are not only to protect taxpayers from having to pay for these unwarranted and unlawful pursuits in the future (this is costing county taxpayers $80,000), but to also reinforce that recalls should be reserved for egregious and unlawful behavior, not differences of opinion over public policy decisions," she said in an email. "I have also incurred considerable costs in having to defend myself against this unlawful recall attempt, therefore economic damages would be pursued as well."

Berschauer further argued that the wording on the petition, circulated during the first of the year and garnering more than 7,000 signatures, differed significantly from the petition circulated in November that was disqualified by the county on a technical error. She said her team had concerns about the statement on the first petition, but its disqualification rendered it unnecessary to retain an attorney to question its legality.

"When Mr. Fovre filed the second petition, we were shocked to see that his statement changed considerably," Berschauer said. "The language and accusations were markedly different from 'round one.'"

At that point Berschauer hired an attorney, who suggested that the statements were fundamentally false and could be proven as such.

"The statute says that the individual must have known at the time that their statements were false," said Berschauer, who owned and operated a political consulting firm prior to being elected. "We believe, given that Mr. Fovre had spent months on this effort, that he and Save Yamhill County knew the statements provided in the recall petition were false."

Shaw explained that the wording on the petition, technically called a "recall statement," was approved by County Clerk Brian Van Bergen, which allowed SYC to begin circulating the petition and collect signatures.

"That approval happened for this recall on Nov. 18," Shaw said. "The petition is a public document and has been accessible to Commissioner Berschauer and her legal counsel since Nov. 18. We never heard anything from the commissioner or her counsel about the wording on our statement until well after our signatures were submitted for certification and ballots were soon to be delivered to voters."

Shaw said Berschauer's goal was misdirection, plain and simple.

"We believe the commissioner's threat of a lawsuit was intended to harass and intimidate our recall effort," Shaw said. "It's a political strategy she has used with us before: threaten and claim violations of some sort, but never follow through because the damage is done with the threat and misleading messaging that she stands up around it. It's a hardball political tactic, and it has no place here in local politics, especially when used against members of the community."

Shaw responded to Berschauer's threat of legal action with a promise: "If a suit is ever filed, it will most definitely be met with an anti-SLAPP motion. It's highly doubtful she'll take it further, because she understands that this is a classic SLAPP suit, denying us our First Amendment rights, and it's not winnable."

SLAPP is an acronym for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and is intended to silence critics by forcing them to mount a costly legal defense. Anti-SLAPP laws were adopted in Oregon and many other states more than a decade ago to protect individuals and organizations from litigation while protecting their First Amendment rights.

Berschauer argued that SYC's actions violated state statute that make it illegal to complete and file a recall petition with reckless disregard and that it contains false statement of material fact related to the public officer subject to the recall.

"We also believe that their actions won't qualify for anti-SLAPP protections given the statute's clear language."

You count on us to stay informed and we depend on you to fund our efforts.Quality local journalism takes time and money. Please support us to protect the future of community journalism.

Read the original post:
Berschauer threat of legal action not carried through - Portland Tribune