The recent election produced an empty Lompoc City Council seat and, according to state law, a selection must be made to fill it within 60 days with three council members supporting the choice. There have been at least seven occasions in the past four decades when the council had to make a similar choice — each was fraught with controversy.
City Administrator Patrick Wiemiller offered several options to make this choice shortly after the new council was seated. One, to hold a special election, was quickly rejected when Wiemiller reported that the cost would be about $166,000, which would come from the sparse general fund.
To be clear, the council could have used any method they wanted to fill the seat. The easiest was to simply choose the runner-up in the council race. Instead, they took the hardest path.
Mayor Bob Lingl nominated Ann Ruhge, a former council member and planning commissioner, but it failed on a 2-2 vote and left the council trying to decide what to do next. Two council members (Dirk Starbuck and Victor Vega) failed to acknowledge that Ruhge placed third and was the choice that 2,075 voters made on Nov. 4.
It was hard to follow all the twists and turns of the debate that followed. One minute they would decide to hold hearings during a regular council meeting, and then a couple of minutes later it was changed to a Saturday. Then they had trouble figuring out how many questions each would ask and how they would make the selection.
It was Starbuck who steered the decision-making process toward what some consider a confusing selection method. Following his lead, they spent well over an hour trying to figure out what he was talking about and then setting out some ground rules as he waived a textbook and a Lompoc Unified School Board policy for filling empty seats around to punctuate his points.
Of course, none of them, with the exception of Starbuck, had read the policy or the book, so they were at a disadvantage as he would read excerpts to them in an effort to get them to make his point.
They finally decided to open a written application process for five business days and have applicants submit their qualifications on a form created by the city and attach a one-page resume to it for consideration. This is similar to the way people submit their information for an election — they apply and then submit a ballot statement.
Then they tried to decide when they would make their selection. Staff recommended doing it during a regular council meeting, but after a short math exercise they discovered that if several people applied for the seat that it could take several hours just to question and interview the candidates. So, they decided after several minutes of discussion to hold hearings on Saturday, Dec. 20.
The interview process will include both a review of the written applications and an oral interview. Each candidate will be allowed a couple of minutes to make an opening statement and then they decided to allow each council member to ask two questions of each applicant. This process could take a couple of hours to complete.
When they discussed how they would make their selection, once again it was Starbuck who led the way. He suggested based on the school board policy he was waiving around that the list of applicants be selectively reduced using a process of elimination.
Not discussed was what they would do if they couldn’t reach consensus and the debate stalled — hopefully that won’t happen.
Several candidates for the council election were in attendance, and a few expressed their interest in being appointed; the recently defeated mayor, John Linn, said he was going to apply for the post. But should he be seriously considered? After all, one council candidate received over 300 more votes than Linn did and he was in an eight-person race.
During his last few minutes as mayor, Linn tried to shift money from the Charlotte’s Web children’s library site, a project that had previously been approved by the council, to fix park bathrooms. His argument demonstrated clearly that after four years in office he still doesn’t understand how these kinds of projects work and that his own personal agenda was the only thing that counted.
Maybe he thought that he could influence two other council members to agree with his position during his lame duck meeting, and maybe he forgot that he just lost an election in a historic landslide because of antics like this. None of them bought his story.
On Tuesday, Dec. 9, the applicant list will be finalized and it’s hard to predict how this will turn out. One thing is certain: There is likely to be a lot of controversy when they are finished. All of this drama wasn’t necessary.
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry and has been active with Lompoc municipal government commissions and committee since 1992, including 12 years on the Lompoc Planning Commission. He is also a voting member of the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association. Contact him at news@noozhawk.com. The opinions expressed are his own.
