The Woodland Park Charter states in Section 1.4 – Form of Government, “Pursuant to the Charter provisions and subject only to limitations imposed by the State Constitution and by this Charter, all municipal responsibilities shall be vested in an elected council which shall enact local legislation, adopt budgets, determine policies and appoint the City Manager, who shall execute the laws and administer the City government.” (emphasis added).

To fill a City Council vacant position, a conflict with our “Form of Government” allows City Council to appoint unelected officials instead of having only elected officials.

Allowing City Council appointments not only gives us unelected officials, but is also a way for only four people to control who makes Woodland Park government decisions. If a special interest group or a coalition becomes a City Council majority, the vacancy appointment process provides an opportunity to solidify that control.

To fill a vacancy, our City Council can currently authorize one of the following:

(i) appoint any qualified person,

(ii) conduct an open application process,

(iii) appoint the person who received the next highest vote total in the last municipal election should the vacancy occur within six (6) months of said election,

or (iv) hold a Special Election

If either (i) or (ii) is authorized, the citizens have no voice and no vote, resulting in an unelected official sitting on the Dias, making significant decisions that can impact our lives as long as we live here.

If (iii) or (iv) is used, at least the voters had a voice and a vote in who joins our City Leaders on the Dias.

But it’s too expensive to hold a Special Election. Worse case is a cost of around $30,000 to let the voters decide. Putting that into perspective, that’s less than one tenth of one percent of our yearly City Budget. That’s an extremely small price to pay to allow the voters to decide, giving us actual elected officials.

But we don’t want to have a lot of Special Elections. There are not enough vacancies to fill that would be outside our normal election cycles to make it cumbersome and too frequent to let the voters decide.

I have already proposed via our Charter Review Committee a simple change to our Charter to fill a City Council vacancy. My proposal is to either leave the vacancy unfilled until the next regular Municipal Election or authorize a Special Election to let the voters decide.

My proposal will allow the Voters to always elect every member of our City Council in compliance with our Form of Government, as our Charter states.

Full Disclosure: When asked about being appointed to the position that became vacant when Teri Baldwin resigned, I told members of our City Council that I would be willing to be appointed since I received 46.7% of the votes for Mayor in the last Municipal Election. However, I would not be willing to be appointed by any means that takes away the voices and votes of 6,000 Woodland Park voters to become another Unelected City Council member.