Resident launches recall petition against Auburn mayor

Published 1:15 pm Thursday, February 19, 2026

Auburn resident Ronnie Morgan III, a candidate for mayor in 2025, has filed a petition to remove Mayor Nancy Backus from office, four months after her election to a fourth consecutive term.

“This petition is a direct result of the lack of trust the city places in our Mayor’s ability to run our city according to a code of ethics and accountability,” Morgan wrote of the filing.

Below is a brief synopsis of the main grievances Morgan enumerates in the petition, which allege, among other claims, that Backus:

• Has used “undue influence on many occasions to grant unwarranted privileges not available to the general public.”

• “Received an endorsement and donations to her campaign from the 47th Democratic District in 2025,” while her friend was president of that organization. Morgan noted that president of the 47th was placed on on the city’s salary commission, which determines the mayor’s pay and benefits.

• “Repeatedly mishandled sexual assault and even murder cases favoring the perpetrators not the victims,” and that she went so far as to transfer all sexual assault claims out of the Auburn Police Department Internal Investigations unit and into a department she has direct control over, after an Auburn police sergeant — whose mother, Morgan claims, is a personal friend of Backus — allegedly assaulted fellow officers.

• That the mayor’s official statement in the wake of former APD Officer Jeff Nelson’s 2024 conviction for second-degree murder and assault in the death of Jesse Sarey in 2019, contradicted her own claim that she “takes complaints seriously” and uses corrective action where necessary in light of the “significant volume of evidence that points towards systematic problems of an oppressive culture and abuse of power that have been allowed to persist.”

• That Backus intervened in a letter on behalf of Joshua Obadiah Headley, a former Auburn pastor who had just pleaded guilty to child rape of a 15-year-old girl while he was a pastor at Auburn’s Northwest Family Church.

Morgan quotes from a KIRO Newsradio article from late last year that alleged “questionable” mayoral judgment in the case, “apparently coordinated narratives, and a network of civic leaders,” who he claimed appeared to look the other way, allowing Headley to be celebrated before he went to prison, and then again almost immediately after his release when he operated under a new identity.

At an Auburn City Council meeting in November 2025, Backus defended herself against the contents of that letter, asserting that she believed in restorative justice, and that, given her newfound awareness of the facts of that case, would not write the same letter of support today. Backus said she had not been in contact with Headley since his release, and recast the purpose of a prayer rally residents held in response to the case.

Backus did not return a call from the Auburn Reporter seeking comment on Tuesday.

The petition will be the subject of a hearing before Judge David Whedbee at 1:30 p.m. Feb. 24. in courtroom E-201 of the downtown Seattle King County Courthouse. Lindsay Grieve, King County Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for the Civil Division, she filed the petition along with the ballot synopsis in King County Superior Court on behalf of the KCPAO.