The process to fill a vacant seat on Hillsborough’s Board of Commissioners will begin on Monday at the Board’s regular meeting. The vacancy, which will be left by current commissioner Jenn Weaver running unattested for mayor, must be filled by appointment by the remaining commissioners rather than an election, due to state law. Current Hillsborough mayor Tom Stevens says the board wants to get an early start in filling the seat.
“We wanted to get ahead of that and start thinking about how we’re going to appoint a person to take her seat,” the Mayor says. “We’ve asked about whether we could do an election or if we’d need to do an appointment, apparently the state law is such that we’d need to do an appointment.”
Several commissioners express concern since this will now be the second seat filled by appointment after Matt Hughes was named a commissioner by the board last year. Stevens says the board would prefer to hold a special election, but their hands are tied.
“If we had our druthers we could probably say ‘let’s wait and have an election that could coincide with the primaries that happen in May’ so we wouldn’t have to wait too long to fill that seat,” says Stevens. “Turns out, we don’t have the authority to do so.”
While the board is looking to be thorough in their search, Stevens says they would like to find a candidate in time for the biannual school government held by the North Carolina League of Municipalities.
“We don’t want to over rush the process, but if we could go ahead and identify somebody in short order to do that, we could also get them in on the training that the school government does for new officials,” Stevens states. “It happens only once every two years, so that person would have at least some more background and have the opportunity to have that education.”
The board will be proposing a schedule at the meeting on Monday, and hopes to begin looking at candidates and holding interviews in November.
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