How to fill a City Council vacancy?

How should vacant city council positions be filled?

Every city council eventually has a vacancy. Eventually meaning almost yearly. Aldermen come and go so quickly on some councils it is hard to watch the game without a scorecard.

Tacoma is struggling with this process right now.

Earlier this month, at least 40 candidates, vying to fill out the remaining terms of two at-large council seats, gave presentations to sitting city council-members about their qualifications and reasons for seeking the appointments. Although the current council kicked off the appointment process, next year’s newly configured council, which includes three newly elected members, will actually make the selections to fill the vacancies.

Council will hold a special meeting to discuss qualifications of the selected candidates in executive session*, to be followed by an open meeting to select appointees to serve on the City Council. Executive sessions are not open to the public.

Letters will be sent to the selected candidates regarding the results of the meeting.

Forty candidates? Presentations in open session. Deliberations in closed session.

Personally I like Mayor appointment with Council approval to fill those slots. How’s that for an opinion from a former Mayor?

Students … what do you think?  This is your assignment. What is the best way to chose replacement aldermen?

Leave your comments and thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 3:56 am and is filed under Electioneering 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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