Encinitas will nominate someone to fill a newly vacant seat on the City Council, rather than holding a special election.
On Wednesday, the council voted 3-1, with newly elected councilor Bruce Ehlers opposing, to go ahead with the nomination process, saying it would save the city money and get someone in office faster. The board hopes to select a candidate to fill the position by the end of January.
The earliest a special election could have been held is May 2, and the county voter registrar has estimated the city’s cost for such a special election to be between $250 and $400,000, said City Clerk Kathy Hollywood.
Mayor Tony Kranz, a former longtime councilor whose recent election to the mayoral position created the new council vacancy, voted in favor of the nomination process along with councilors Kellie Hinze and Joy Lyndes. Both Hinze and Lyndes were originally appointed to the board and subsequently ran for election.
“We were well served by the nomination process,” said Hinze.
Hinze said she would rather spend money on infrastructure improvements than a special election, while Lyndes said the nomination process could reveal a candidate like her who is “more of a civil servant than a politician”.
While a majority of the council supported nominating someone for the post, 11 of the 16 public speakers on the issue said the city should host a special election, calling it a democratic thing to do and “well worth the money.” “.
Ehlers said he strongly agreed with them. Noting that he had just been elected, he said it was highly unlikely that the current board would have chosen him as nominee if his predecessor, Joe Mosca, had resigned before the end of his term.
Ehlers is a former city planning commissioner who was removed from the commission in April. Board members said they unanimously voted to remove him because they believed he could not be impartial on housing development issues after he filed paperwork supporting a lawsuit against the city. Ehlers and his supporters said it was a vindictive political coup aimed at derailing Ehlers’ campaign for City Council.
On Wednesday, Ehlers noted that Del Mar and Carlsbad do not allow council nominees to run for office in the next election and said Encinitas should adopt a similar city code.
That’s not possible unless Encinitas wants to change its governance system, Kranz told him. Del Mar and Carlsbad are charter cities, which means they have special government documents, or charters, approved by their constituents. Encinitas, like most cities in California, is a general law city, meaning that it operates under the general laws of the state.
Under state law, cities must hold an election if there is more than two years left in a person’s term when the council seat is vacated. If it is two years or less, cities have the option of holding a special election or having the council nominate someone to fill the term. When Kranz took over as mayor, there was just under two years left in the board’s four-year term.
As an alderman, Kranz represented the city’s District 1, which primarily encompasses the Leucadia region. The nominee replacing him must also come from this area. Candidates also need to be at least 18 years old and a registered voter. The application deadline is likely to be Jan. 10 in order to meet the council’s goal of considering candidates at its Jan. 18 meeting, the city secretary said Wednesday.
In another action Wednesday, the City Council:
