A former professional poker player has launched a petition to recall Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, in the wake of her comments last month offering to reopen the city as a “control group” in the COVID-19 crisis.
Doug Polk kicked off the recall effort this week, releasing a video and launching a website, RecallCarolynGoodman.com.
“I don't want to recall the mayor just because she wants to re-open Las Vegas,” Polk wrote of the campaign on Twitter. “She also cares more about the ‘sensitive' casino owners interests than the people of Las Vegas. Additionally, she was unable to maintain a conversation with functional sentences.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports: From the start of the pandemic, the mayor has resisted intense measures to slow the spread of the virus: She said statewide business closures would be “devastating”prior to Gov. Steve Sisolak's edict to do so, and later called the shutdown “total insanity.” But it was her appearances on national television last month — first with NBC's Katy Tur, then CNN's Anderson Cooper — that prompted the fiercest criticisms. Goodman said the city should be used as a control group to test whether social distancing measures were working and suggested that businesses that reopen and are hit hard by virus outbreaks would simply be swallowed by competition.
More from the Hill: Polk said he has 90 days to submit a petition with 25 percent of the voters from the 2019 election, which he said is about 6,745 people. On Thursday he tweeted he had received almost a hundred people request recall kits to sign the petition. … If enough valid signatures are collected by the Aug. 4 cutoff date, it would trigger mayoral recall election, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Goodman responded to the recall effort, claiming its Polk's choice as an American to undertake the task. “Regarding recall effort: This is America. That's his choice,” she tweeted Thursday. Polk wrote back to Goodman's tweet, “Thanks for the support mayor!”
