HOOD COUNTY EXPRESS | THE RECALL LINE
⚖️ Recall Petition Volunteer Seeks To Join Officials' Lawsuit
📅 October 19th, 2026AD
Following Granbury's recall from petition to ballot, one stop at a time.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
UPDATE, 10:15 a.m. Monday: The Hood County District Clerk has accepted Kellie Chewning's petition in intervention. It appeared on the public docket at 8:53 a.m., about five and a half hours after she submitted it through eFileTexas. The filing includes a certificate of service and a sworn declaration. This story has been updated to reflect the acceptance.
GRANBURY — A volunteer who says she gathered signatures for Granbury's recall petitions has asked to join the lawsuit three city officials filed to stop them. She wants the court to order the recall election.
Kellie Chewning, who posts on Facebook as Kell Chew, submitted an "Intervenor's Original Petition in Intervention" through eFileTexas at 3:25 a.m. Monday in Cause No. C2026539 in the 355th Judicial District Court. She is representing herself. The clerk accepted the filing at 8:53 a.m. Monday.
In a text message to Hood County Express on Monday morning, before the clerk accepted the filing, Chewning said she expects the clerk to take time and that the filing "is in the queue on my end."
Mayor Jim Jarratt, Mayor Pro Tem Bruce Wadley and Council Member Gary "Skip" Overdier sued the City of Granbury on Oct. 6. Their lawsuit seeks to invalidate the recall petitions against them and alleges fraud, forgery and other defects by the people who gathered signatures. Those are the plaintiffs' allegations; no court has made findings.
The officials' lawsuit also says that unless the court rules otherwise, the city has a ministerial duty to order a recall election for May 2027.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
WHO SHE SAYS SHE IS
Her filing says Chewning lives in Hood County outside Granbury's city limits and is not registered to vote in the city.
It says she was a volunteer block walker who collected signatures face to face and signed circulator affidavits under oath before a notary.
She argues the lawsuit's fraud claims are "directly attacking Intervenor's personal integrity, nullifying their extensive volunteer labor, and suppressing their core political speech."
Asked how she has a stake as a non-city voter, Chewning said in the text message: "I collected those signatures. It's a violation of my constitutional rights." She also said she was "pretty sure" she had posted established case law with her materials.
In a declaration filed with the petition, she says every signature on her assigned petition pages "was collected live, as an original ink-on-paper ('wet') signature, and only after verifying the signer's residence."
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
WHAT SHE ASKS
Her filing asks the court to:
- allow her to intervene
- deny the officials' request for an injunction
- declare the signature threshold to be 1,292
- order the city to schedule the recall election under Section 4.08 of the City Charter
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HER MAIN ARGUMENTS
The threshold. The officials' lawsuit says each petition needed 1,370 valid signatures, 15% of the 9,133 registered voters in the November 2025 city election. It acknowledges the city secretary certified all five petitions as meeting that number, but argues enough signatures are invalid that the petitions fall short.
Chewning argues the count should leave out voters marked "S," for suspense, on the voter rolls. She cites Texas Election Code Section 277.0024, which does exclude those voters when a petition threshold is computed from the number of registered voters.
Her filing does not show how many suspense voters she subtracted or how she reached 1,292. The filing also describes the charter standard as 10%. The charter sets it at 15%. In the text message Monday, Chewning said the 10% "is the typo" and that "the math is actually 15% so it's fine," adding she "can change it later." The version the clerk accepted Monday still says 10%.
The earlier appeal. Her filing says city officials agreed Aug. 24 to present the petitions after recall organizers Daniel Piatt and Janet Logsdon went to the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth. The city secretary certified all five petitions Sept. 8, and the appeals court denied the organizers' mandamus request as moot Sept. 21.
Chewning argues that the officials, having let the certification go forward, cannot now call the same petitions fraudulent. She cites a doctrine called quasi-estoppel, which can bar a party from switching to a position inconsistent with one it accepted earlier when allowing the switch would be unconscionable.
The calendar. She argues the officials' request to wait for the state's May 2027 election calendar "lacks lawful basis." HCE reported Oct. 18 that neither Granbury's recall provision nor the state election-ordering law SoRelle cited requires waiting for a published calendar.
The fraud claims. She argues the officials' fraud allegations are too general because they do not identify specific signatures or pages. The officials' lawsuit names no circulator and attaches no exhibits.
Handwriting and dates. She argues state law requires only the signature itself to be in the signer's own handwriting, which Section 277.002 says. She also argues a signing date that leaves off the year should still count, because each page carries a notarized circulator affidavit.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
HER ALLEGATIONS AGAINST CITY OFFICIALS
Much of her filing is a timeline that Chewning says shows "a continuous, unlawful pattern of ultra vires obstruction," meaning action beyond legal authority, by the plaintiffs, City Secretary Carla Walker and City Attorney Jeremy SoRelle. Among her allegations:
- The July 28 rejections of the petitions exceeded the city secretary's limited role. The city said July 28 the petitions were not certified after the city secretary and city attorney reviewed them.
- City staff threw out valid signatures over technicalities, such as an address that left off "Granbury." She says Section 277.002 forbids that. The statute expressly excuses only a missing state or ZIP code.
- Challenges to the petitions were privately delivered to the city Sept. 8 without public notice.
- Jarratt violated the Texas Open Meetings Act at the Sept. 15 council meeting by announcing recall details that were not on the posted agenda.
- The Sept. 28 hearings were too late; she says they should have been held by Sept. 23. The charter requires a hearing 5 to 15 days after the council receives an official's request. The officials requested hearings Sept. 15, according to their lawsuit.
- At the Oct. 6 meeting, the city attorney had the council suspend its rules so plaintiffs' attorney Andy Taylor could announce the lawsuit from the podium. She calls that an open-meetings violation, and she argues SoRelle's later use of the lawsuit's calendar argument shows "non-adversarial collusion."
Asked for the source of her Sept. 8 desk-delivery claim, Chewning said in the text message that officials "handled the delivery completely behind the scenes as they said in the city council meetings" and that "they are the source." HCE has not confirmed that officials made that statement in council meetings. The filing attaches a declaration about how she collected signatures but no exhibits supporting these timeline allegations. None has been tested in court.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 60 lets a person intervene by filing a pleading, but the court may strike the intervention for sufficient cause on a party's motion. If a party moves to strike, the intervenor must show a justiciable interest, meaning a legal stake of her own, in the case.
A certificate of service filed with the petition says Chewning served it through eFileTexas on Oct. 19 to plaintiffs' attorney Andy Taylor and to City Attorney Jeremy SoRelle.
As of 10:15 a.m. Monday, the public docket showed Chewning's intervention accepted at 8:53 a.m., no hearing set, no ruling and no filing by the city.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Hood County Express — Est’d 1/26 🚂
© 2026 Hood County Express. All Rights Reserved
HoodCountyExpress.com
#HoodCounty #GranburyTX #GranburyRecall
