Opinion: How many open council seats will there really be?

Under the system proposed by the City Council and approved by Boulder voters (with no alternatives provided for us to consider), a sitting council member with two years left in their four-year term can run for mayor. That council member only must resign their council seat if they are elected as mayor. So, if they lose, they retain their council seat for two more years, and there are four council vacancies to fill. But if they win, the council candidate that got the fifth-most votes gets the now vacant fifth seat.

As a result, the voters have total uncertainty as to how many open seats there will be. Will there be four or five open seats on the council to be filled in the upcoming election? For example, this year, if council member Nicole Speer wins the mayoral race, there will be five open seats, and if she loses, there will be four. But the voters only get four votes, even though there might be five open seats.

That makes it very difficult for everyone, including candidates deciding whether to run, groups deciding how many candidates to endorse and contributors deciding how many candidates to contribute to.

Neither Longmont nor Fort Collins, both of which have directly elected mayors, do it this way. Longmont holds a special election in the months after the election if a council member takes over being mayor and their council seat becomes vacant. In Fort Collins, the council itself fills the vacant seat within 45 days of the election (as Boulder used to do for council vacancies), and the appointee serves until the next regular election. Our council could have put these alternatives on the ballot and given us a choice. But they didn’t.

The council could also have provided us with a third alternative (which I’ve heard was informally rejected by council members.) It would require that the sitting council member who is considering running for mayor make their choice by, say, July 15. If they choose to run for mayor, then they also commit irreversibly to resign their council seat as of the election, whether they win or lose the mayoral race. It would then be clear that there are five open seats.

Importantly, under this last approach, there are consequences to running for mayor when your council term is not up. The way it is now, why not run for mayor, even if you’re not really serious? All that can happen is that you go back to being on the council. We could have multiple sitting council members running!

This “agreement to resign” approach also puts all mayoral candidates on equal footing in terms of impact on the council election, since the number of open seats will then be resolved early in the election cycle.

Any of these approaches would avoid us voters having to live with the uncertainty as to the number of open seats. Potential candidates would be certain as to whether to run for the fifth seat. And groups and individual citizens would be clear as to whether to support four or five candidates, etc.

To add a bit of detail, a group trying to support a slate, or an individual trying to decide where to contribute their money, has two mutually exclusive situations to strategize for under our current uncertainty system:

If that person or group bets one way (supporting four for the council), then they could miss the opportunity to help fill a fifth open council seat. If that person or group bets the other way (supporting five for council), then each of the supported candidates gets four-fifths of the resources that would have been devoted to a given candidate in the first scenario, and so the person or group diluted their chances of winning if only four seats end up being open. And the folks who supported five for council must choose which of their four to vote for, diluting their votes by four-fifths.

For this year, Nicole Speer, the council member with two years left in her term and who is running for mayor, could resolve all this by committing now to resign from the council as of November 2023, whether she wins or loses the mayoral race.

There are other issues with our election laws, including the lack of serious enforcement of “no coordination” between candidates rules in the Code, and the flaws in ranked choice voting. But mayoral candidates agreeing to resign from council whether they win or lose, as above, would be a good start.

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