Letters:

To the Editor

Congratulations?

Ipswich now has a mayor that no one elected. How did that happen? From what I can determine, the first step was to illegally ignore City Ordinance 1-1-4 which mandates that “At the first regular meeting after the annual election of each year and after the qualification of the newly elected council members, the Council shall elect from its own members a president and vice president…” That meeting took place on April 22nd. The municipal election canvas meeting took place 11 days prior at 4:00 pm on April 11th at which time the election was certified. Therefore, there was no reason for the law to have not been followed and the new council sworn in. Meanwhile, the Mayor used that meeting to appoint a replacement council member for a council member that conveniently waited until right after the election to resign. Hmmm.

This is important because if the Council had followed the law, Mike Steen, since he lost the election in his ward, would no longer have been a Council member at the May 7th meeting during which he was “voted” in. Following the South Dakota State law SDCL 9-9-8: If the office of mayor is vacated, the board of commissioners shall appoint by a majority vote one of its commissioners as acting mayor. The acting mayor is invested with all the powers and shall perform all the duties of the mayor, until the election of a mayor. The acting mayor has only one vote as a commissioner and is not entitled to vote as acting mayor., means that Mike should not have been eligible. For clarity, the language of the law talking about the board of commissioners is akin to city council for all intents and purposes as I read it.

The simple fact is, there is no law in South Dakota that allows a City Council to elect a mayor independent of the current sitting council members. There should in fact be 6 council members with one of them being the “acting mayor”, not six council members and a mayor elected by the council

I don’t believe for one minute that this was an oversight. I see it as an in-your-face deliberate overreach to install a “preferred” option who doesn’t even have the confidence of a majority of the people in his own ward. I propose that the voters of Ipswich should consider a ballot ordinance to call for a special election in the event an elected official vacates their position to prevent these abuses this November.

Right now, I am being represented by an appointed council member who didn’t even bother to run for the office. These appointments are about promoting someone’s agenda rather than an honest effort to represent the interests of the people. If it were not so, then the person that did run for the council position in my ward would have been appointed.

If there is enough interest in drafting a ballot ordinance calling for special elections in these circumstances, talk it up and let others know. We can take back our local government if we have the will. It would only take a good attorney a couple of hours to draft such an ordinance and get it on the ballot for the November election.

Meanwhile, congratulations Mike. I wish you the best and hope you prove to be a credit to the office. Otherwise, resign and let the process play out to install an Acting Mayor as prescribed by law.

Ed Bierman