RIGHT OR WRONG, POT VOTES ARE NO CAUSE FOR RECALL

Recalls are in style in Shasta County this season - as faddish as
Oregon Ducks T-shirts and speculation about when Mt. Shasta might
open for skiing.

But you know, for fear of minimizing the importance of college
football and snowboarding weekends, our democracy is serious
business. It deserves more than flavor-of-the-month treatment.

Yet that seems to be what's driving recall notices served by
medical-marijuana activists against Redding City Councilors Rick
Bosetti, Patrick Jones and Francie Sullivan and Shasta County Sheriff
Tom Bosenko - and reportedly in the works against county Supervisors
Les Baugh and David Kehoe.

Hey, it seems to be working in Shasta Lake against Dolores Lucero,
where a recall drive qualified for the ballot late last year. Why not
use this handy tool more often?

Well here's the deal. The voters choose their representatives -
hopefully folks with brains and judgment who share their
constituents' basic values - and hand them the job of weighing the
competing interests that add up to the public good, then making their
best call.

Are they always right? Most certainly not. But aggrieved citizens
have ways to challenge what they think are bad decisions - in
particular the courts and the referendum, both of which
medical-marijuana activists are pursuing to reverse recent votes by
the Redding and Shasta County that they think are too restrictive.
The judges and the voters' signatures will speak, respectively, for
the law and the public will on this issue.

But the recall - another weapon in the people's arsenal to fight back
when our institutions go astray - is directed not just at a
particular decision, but at a person. It can make sense when an
official's conduct in office is so egregious, so contrary to the
public good, that there's no resort but for the voters to cop to a
mistake and try again.

After nearly two years' of Lucero's abuse and disruption, Shasta
Lake's citizens found they'd had enough. But David Kehoe? Tom
Bosenko? Both have enough community respect that they ran unopposed
in their most recent elections. All the supposed recall targets but
Sullivan ran on their records in 2010 and were re-elected. Nothing
they've done since suggests they've misused their offices, abused the
public's trust, or otherwise given the voters reason to seek a
do-over. They just cast votes some dedicated activists don't like -
or in Bosenko's case, just supported the county's plan.

It's a free country. Everyone has a right to gather signatures. And
there's nothing wrong with protesting when citizens think their
representatives have gone astray.

But in our view - and, we'll bet, that of the vast majority of city
and county residents - nothing these officials have done is even
close to recall territory.