Hillman on recall: 'I don't have to prove anything'
STORY
After appearing on television with only a fraction of the nearly 1,800 petitions she claimed she collected to oust Vero Beach Mayor Craig Fletcher and Vice Mayor Tracy Carroll, activist Linda Hillman has again refused to show Vero Beach 32963 all the petitions.
“No, you can’t,” Hillman replied to a request to see the documents. “No one has the right to see them; they are not public record. I don’t have to prove anything.”
Hillman did show some 500 petitions to a known rival of both Fletcher and Carroll – former councilman and declared council candidate Brian Heady.
Heady invited Hillman to appear on his “Fired Up” talk show on WWCI Channel 10 with the petitions to try and assure viewers that Hillman’s claims that she had collected nearly 1,800 petitions – just short of the 10 percent required for the success of the recall effort – were indeed accurate.
“I asked Linda to come on the show under the condition that she bring the petitions,” Heady said prior to the airing of the show last week. “She showed up with about 500 petitions and said that someone else had the rest of the petitions, that they were using them to create a mailing list, to do mailings during the election season.”
Heady showed the stack of petitions that Hillman brought on television.
“It was a little bigger than a ream of paper,” Heady said, noting that the typical ream of copy paper contains about 500 sheets, “The petitions all had signatures and they were different signatures. They looked real to me.”
Hillman said on Saturday that she did not bring all the petitions she had collected to the Channel 10 studio because the bulk was too much to carry. Hillman maintains the accuracy of the number and confirmed that said she is using the personal information collected from signatories.
Despite the fact that Hillman produced only a fraction of the petitions on his show, Heady said he gives her the benefit of the doubt about the existence of the balance of the documents. “That’s not for me to say,” Heady said. “People can decide for themselves.”
