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Politics

Vote for mayor's successor must wait

Picking someone now may violate the charter, Seminole leaders are told.

By ANNE LINDBERG
Published October 15, 2006

SEMINOLE - The Seminole City Council had an easy time deciding how to fill resigning Mayor Dottie Reeder's seat.

The next mayor will be one of the existing council members come Nov. 7, when Reeder leaves office because of her bid for state House District 51.

But when it came time Tuesday to talk about how to fill the resulting council vacancy, not everyone agreed.

After an impassioned debate at a workshop Tuesday, the majority of the group favored filling it with the first runner-up from the last election in March. That would be Bob Matthews, who owns Seminole Garden Florist and received 660 votes in the race for three seats, just six votes behind council member John Counts.

The group was scheduled to approve the decision formally with a vote later Tuesday night at the council meeting, an action City Attorney John Elias promptly stopped.

The city charter, he said, prevents the council from naming a successor until there's an opening. The next highest vote-getter from the last election is an identifiable person, Elias said, meaning that the council would be violating the charter by voting now to use that method.

The vote, he said, must wait until November.

A smaller council faction sought to allow anyone to submit an application for the vacancy. The council would then choose the best of the applicants.

Vice Mayor Dan Hester was the main proponent of that view, saying it would provide a chance to get new blood and ideas on the council.

Hester said choosing the next highest vote-getter would set a bad precedent. What if, he asked, there was only one other candidate? That person would be chosen even if he or she was crazy and would be a bad council member.

"I'm looking past this election, this appointment, to what may come in the future," Hester said.

Other council members discounted that argument saying they could change their method of choosing at any time.

"I agree that it would be very dangerous to set a permanent policy," Counts said. But in this case, he said, the fourth-place candidate was a good choice.

Council member Jimmy Johnson so strongly supported the idea that the next-highest vote-getter should be chosen that he spent most of Tuesday getting to the meeting. He drove from Cashiers, N.C., where he was vacationing, to Spartanburg, S.C., in the early morning to catch a plane to Tampa. Johnson missed his flight by 14 minutes and sat most of the day in the Spartanburg airport waiting for the next flight. He landed just in time to take a shower, change and walk into the council workshop moments before it began.

He spoke first and pleaded with the other council members to share his opinion.

"The public has spoken," Johnson said. "People must have been in favor of him or he wouldn't have gotten that many votes."

[Last modified October 15, 2006, 09:13:53]