SLO County woman wins fight over bill for election recount
The woman who requested a ballot recount for the 2022 District 2 Board of Supervisors race doesn’t owe the county any extra money for the process.
In fact, a judge decided that the county overcharged her for the recount.
The county originally charged the recount requester, San Miguel resident Darcia Stebbens, $53,346.59 for the process. On Tuesday, San Luis Obispo Superior Court Jude Rita Federman ruled the San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder’s Office must remove $5,088.27 from the bill for the ballot recount.
According to Federman, the California Elections Code requires the recount requester to pay for all actual costs incurred by the recount — but the County Clerk-Recorder did not prove the need for more than $5,000 of those costs.
What happened during the ballot recount?
Stebbens requested a recount of the ballots cast during the 2022 District 2 supervisor race on Dec. 12, 2022 — about a week after the election results were finalized.
According to the certified results, incumbent supervisor Bruce Gibson defeated his challenger, Templeton resident Bruce Jones, by a total of 13 votes.
Stebbens ended the manual recount early on Dec. 29 after election staff had tallied about 20% of the ballots. By then, she had paid the county $45,979.
State law required Stebbens, as the person who requested a manual ballot recount, to cover all recount costs generated by her request.
When the recount ended, the county tallied actual costs that weren’t included in the initial estimated costs, and informed Stebbens that she owed another $7,367 as of Jan. 18, 2023, Cano said.
When Stebbens didn’t pay by the original Jan. 25, 2023, deadline, the county extended the deadline to Feb. 3, 2023. Stebbens then paid the county another $2,918.92, according to Cano.
The county gave Stebbens another chance to pay the remaining $4,448.21 by the end of that month, but Stebbens refused, and Cano sued Stebbens in small claims court on May 1, 2023, to recover the remaining funds.
After two days of testimony, San Luis Obispo Superior Court commissioner Leslie Kraut ruled in the county’s favor and ordered Stebbens to pay the balance.
Stebbens appealed Kraut’s decision in October.
On Tuesday, after three days of testimony, Federman ruled in Stebbens’ favor — deciding that Cano did not adequately prove the need for $5,088.27 of costs listed for the recount. Federman ordered the county to remove those costs from Stebbens’ bill.
In her ruling, Federman agreed with the county that Stebbens must pay for the hours worked by attorneys from the county counsel’s office, hours worked by recount board members and the benefits packages of employees who worked on the recount.
She also ruled the county provided Stebbens with all required relevant materials to review as part of the recount.
However, Federman wrote in her decision that the elections office did not provide sufficient proof for $5,088.27 of “hours billed by the Clerk-Recorder’s Office and certain salaried staff members who worked more than eight hours in a day and on weekends on tasks related to the recount.”
According to Federman, Cano proved that her office needed to work overtime to finish the recount “in a timely manner,” but she did not prove that it can be considered part of “actual costs” for the recount.
Staff were not paid overtime for the extended hours, and “there was no evidence of any other costs incurred by the county for these extended hours,” Federman said. “Thus, it is not possible to conclude that the county incurred any ‘actual costs’ for this additional time.”
Federman ordered the county to delete those hours from the bill, reducing the total cost of the recount by $5,088.27. This also means Stebbens won’t have to pay the original outstanding $4,448.21.
It’s unclear whether the county now owes Stebbens the difference paid.
This story was originally published January 30, 2024 at 6:58 PM.
