News

City Council holds special meeting for reorganization

By Scott Wagar

07/01/2014

The Bottineau City Council held a special meeting on June 24 to conduct its reorganization meeting and to discuss other items that could become the future of the city council.

The first order of business for the evening was to reorganize the council after the June 10 city election, which saw four council seats on ballot. Incumbents, Diane Lorenz, Gary Mortensen and Matt Seykora all ran unopposed and were re-elected to their council seats.

The remaining incumbent, Jeff Hall, made the decision to retire from the council after serving the city of Bottineau for 10 years.

The fourth seat, which remained opened due to the fact no individual ran for the open seat, received numerous write-ins with former councilman Troy Marsden receiving the most votes. When it comes to write-ins, state law allows for the mayor of a city to offer the write-in with the most votes the position, but if that individual declines the offer, the seat has to stay open and city leadership can do one of three things, hold a special election, make an appointment or leave the position open until the next city election.   

Marsden, who resigned his position as alderman due to personal reasons, was offered the council position, but he turned the offer down, leaving the seat open.

The city leadership decided not to hold a special election considering no local individual ran for the seat in the first place.

“The only problem I have is we just had an election and we had nobody who wanted to take it,” said Mayor Ben Aufforth. “I think a better idea is to appoint someone.”

The council agreed with the mayor and declared a vacancy on the council seat. The decision was made to allow Aufforth to call the remaining names of the people who were listed on the write-in ballot to see if any of those individuals are interested in taking the position. Aufforth will start with those individuals who received the most votes after Marsden and work down the list. If no individual accepts, the seat, the city will continue its search for council members.

With the retirement of Hall, Fred Kainz resigning from the council three weeks ago because he and his family will be moving to Jamestown, and no local residents interested in running for his seat, it is making it difficult for the remaining councilmen to operate the city in the manner it should be. One major issue concerning this issue is that at times the council members are busy at work and do not always have a quorum when it comes to committee meetings to make a vote on issues.

The council discussed in the reorganization meeting what could be done to obtain local people to be part of the council with little leeway in discovering answers. Penny Nostdahl, city auditor, reminded the council that they do have the option of going from an eight person council to a five person council, which Alderman Tim Sanderson, agreed with, along with an idea of his own.

“I think Penny’s idea is one of the things we have to look into two years down the road and go down to a five man council,” Sanderson said. “Or, my idea is to see us go down to a three man council, that way the mayor has power and we can hire a city manager. I know that is another thing, but I don’t know how many committee meetings we have had to cancel because we were short because guys were busy.”

Aufforth was to announce committee members in the reorganization meeting, but made the decision to hold off on the appointments to see if he and the council can obtain a full council before setting up the committees.

The final order concerning the city was to vote in a new president and vice president for the council. Harley Getzlaff was named the president of the new council, and Greg Bernstein was named vice president.