A Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judge rejected a proposed ballot question aimed at ousting Winthrop Town Council member Max Tassinari, ruling that advocates clearly failed to obtain the number of resident signatures required under the town’s own rules.

Frank Gaziano, an associate justice of the state’s highest appellate court, issued the five-page decision Thursday, three weeks after a group of Winthrop residents filed a petition aiming to force the town to put the Tassinari recall question on the November 4 ballot.

The petitioners, a committee led by town residents including Diana Viens and Sheryl Stracco Howard, acknowledged their recall effort collected 1,994 confirmed signatures from town residents supporting a vote on Mr Tassinari’s removal from office, well below the 2,863 signatures they needed to get the recall question placed on the townwide ballot.

Justice Gaziano sided with town and state officials in agreeing that the Winthrop town charter clearly requires the 2,863 figure – 20 percent of all registered voters in town. The recall committee also cited that figure throughout its signature-collection effort, but then insisted – immediately after the effort fell short – that the recall bid needed only 822 signatures, equal to 20 percent of the number of voters participating in the most recent town election.

The judge also agreed with town and state officials that Winthrop’s Board of Registrars of Voters, which intervened in the case, had no legitimate right to do so. The registrars board has three appointed members – all signers of the Tassinari recall petition – who backed the placement of the question on the November ballot without disclosing their personal support for the recall.

Plain language

“The plain language of the Winthrop town charter is at odds with the petitioner’s interpretation of its terms and with the basis for the petitioner’s purported objection,” Justice Gaziano wrote in his decision.

The recall campaign against Mr Tassinari was pushed by Ms Viens, Ms Howard and allies as an outgrowth of their opposition to the town’s compliance with a state law known as 3A that generally requires cities and towns around Boston to expand zones for multifamily housing. The town’s failure to comply with that law has left it ineligible for potentially millions of dollars in state aid that it typically receives, and facing possible litigation and state-imposed zoning.

In response to the court ruling, another leader of the recall effort, Diane Sands, wrote to the Town Council asking it to vote at its next scheduled meeting to order the recall question placed on the November ballot. That request, however, faces hurdles that include language in the town charter that places that decision in the hands of the town clerk, who has made clear – after two reversals – that the signature requirement was not met. Given that the town is past the legal deadline for making changes to this year’s ballot, Ms Sands also suggested to the Town Council the possibility of holding a special election for voters to consider the question.

Some other town residents, meanwhile, have asked the Town Council to investigate and possibly remove members of the Board of Registrars for having voted on the recall question without disclosing their support for the recall petition, and for acting in defiance of both state officials and Winthrop’s town attorney – who warned the registrars in advance that they had no legal authority over the fate of the ballot question.

The chairman of the registrars, Paul Reardon, also is a candidate for Town Council in the November election.

The Winthrop town attorney, Jim Cipoletta, is facing his own questions. Despite warning the registrars they had no business holding a meeting to consider the appeal of the anti-Tassinari committee, Mr Cipoletta proceeded to participate in that registrars meeting on September 3, and he promised the registrars there that he would legally support whatever decision they made. That put the town in a position where it chose to hire an outside attorney, rather than use Mr Cipoletta, to represent it in the case before Justice Gaziano.

Quite a pickle

“It seems like the town counsel has put himself in quite a pickle,” a state elections official, Michelle Tassinari, the director and legal counsel of the Elections Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said in a September 9 email to Mr Tassinari’s attorney, Peter Christopher. Michelle Tassinari is not related to Max Tassinari.

Advocates of Mr Tassinari’s removal argued that state law generally gives local registrars authority over the approval of recall questions. The judge, however, said that Winthrop’s own more-specific rules on the matter don’t grant that right, and supersede the more general state provision.

Mr Tassinari, in response to the court’s ruling in his favor, said that he would keep working as a Town Council member to bring state funding to Winthrop, and he called on state officials to examine the behavior of the town’s Board of Registrars. “I would hope the attorney general’s office investigates this illegal election activity and exposes any coercion that took place here,” Mr Tassinari said. “We’re a country of laws, a commonwealth of laws, and a town of laws – we don’t pick and choose which ones we follow.”

State Representative Jeffrey Turco – an opponent of town compliance with the 3A law – weighed in on the matter just ahead of the court ruling, saying on WCAT’s Winthrop and the World program that he would be bothered by the behavior of the appointed registrars only if the board members were active participants in the recall campaign, not just three residents among the nearly 2,000 signers of the recall petition.

And in terms of the anti-3A campaign more generally, Representative Turco warned that housing-related politics have begun playing a significant role in the November town election, attracting “outside activists coming in here trying to hoodwink the people of Winthrop with their views, where they’re being bought and paid for by outside developers and outside parties.”

“I think the candidates have an obligation to Winthrop to say, ‘We don’t want outsiders trying to persuade our town,’” Representative Turco said.

The 3A matter has attracted funders and allies from beyond Winthrop on both sides. Winthrop-based advocates of compliance with the 3A law have been guided by Abundant Housing Massachusetts, a coalition of housing advocacy groups across the Boston area, while Winthrop residents demanding 3A rejection and Mr Tassinari’s recall have been represented by a Lynnfield lawyer, Michael Walsh, who has done similar anti-3A organizing around the region. And Representative Turco’s own donor database includes property developers, real estate professionals and other backers from Winthrop and beyond, including Boston and several surrounding towns, plus the states of New York, New Hampshire, Florida and California.