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| Raton City Commission |
Candelario, who has been mayor pro tem since March, when he ran unopposed for a commission seat after being appointed in January 2011 to fill a vacant seat, chaired Tuesday’s commission meeting as mayor for the first time. Candelario stepped into the role following the Oct. 10 resignation of mayor and commissioner Charles Starkovich.
Candelario and City Manager Pete Kampfer each said there are no specific city or state laws that specifically outline how to replace, in a commission-manager form of government such as Raton’s, a mayor who resigns, but city ordinance and state law have identical language that gets close to the matter. The laws say that during a mayor’s “absence,” the mayoral duties shall be performed by the mayor pro tem.
Candelario this week said there is “no protocol” to give the commission direction in selecting a new mayor under the circumstances other than for him to simply “move up.”
The commission selects a mayor from among its members every two years immediately after the municipal election that usually includes two or three commission seats on the ballot.
State law does spell out how the commission is to fill the vacant commissioner seat that used to belong to Starkovich. The commission can appoint a registered Raton voter to complete the term, although it remains to be seen whether the commission will make any appointment before an ongoing recall petition process is completed.
Recall petitions were submitted to the city clerk in late September seeking a recall election for every commissioner. The clerk purged many signatures from the petitions because they did not meet the requirements of state law, she said, leaving the petitions short of the required number of valid signatures to trigger an election. The process now awaits the possible reinstating of signatures of anyone who provides sufficient evidence to the clerk to show that his or her signatures should not have been purged. On Tuesday, the commission took the formal step of accepting the results of the clerk’s examination of the petitions.
Tuesday’s commission agenda listed Candelario as mayor and included an item calling for the commission to appoint a new mayor pro tem. However, the commission tabled action on that matter because Commissioner Jimmy Fanelli was absent from the meeting.
Candelario’s current two-year commission term expires in March 2014. He previously served on the commission from March 1998 to March 2002.
Starkovich resigned in order to pursue an effort as a private citizen to try to change what he called the city’s “discriminatory” at-large voting system that he alleged leaves Hispanic and other minority voters without an adequate political voice in the local election process and underrepresented on the city commission.
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