Ferndale ballot question asks if council members must resign to run for mayor

FERNDALE — Ferndale is considering a big change to its charter in regard to its elections and City Council members.

The city will be putting a charter amendment on the Nov. 3 election ballot that will ask voters if a current member of the City Council must resign in order to run for mayor. The charter currently requires council members to resign before running for mayor.

The council discussed this amendment at its June 8 meeting before approving a resolution to put it on the ballot in a 4-1 vote.

Mayor Pro Tem Laura Mikulski said this change would help avoid having to repeatedly address vacancies on council.

“I don’t love the idea that we would open up another vacancy that would also have to be filled through an appointment process,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like that’s exactly what we wanted, because that just pushes the problem along. You end up with a different vacancy.”

The council had to decide at the meeting whether to place the resolution on the ballot, as the city needed to submit something to the Michigan Department of Attorney General 60 days prior to the Aug. 11 deadline so the department can review and offer any necessary feedback on the proposal.

Council debated whether to put the resolution on the ballot or table it to gather more information. Tabling possibly would have meant having to wait until next year to have a vote.

Mayor Raylon Leaks-May voted against the resolution to put the charter amendment on the ballot. As she saw from the recent appointment of Nina LaSalle to fill a council seat, there are many people who want to be involved in the council process, so requiring a current council member to resign in order to run for mayor opens an opportunity for others.

Leaks-May also wasn’t sure why the charter needs to be changed now.

“I think a city charter is something very important, and it’s not to be played with just to say we did this,” she said. “What I’m trying to understand is why is it an issue? We’ve done it for over 40 years.”

“In this community, people vote for who they want to vote for, and the person that gets out there and just gets their point across succeeds,” Leaks-May continued. “I think this is kind of almost ‘have your cake and eat it too’ approach. I think that we’re adults and if we’re going to run for a seat — we’re all adults — if we’re going to run for a seat, run for the seat. If we’re not, we’re not, and if other people want to run for the seats, they’re able to, but I don’t think it should be like a ‘save the seat’ sort of situation.”

Mikulski didn’t view the potential change as saving a seat for a council member.

“It’s business continuity so that you don’t have somebody leaving their seat in order to run,” she said. “You have business as usual so that things continue on without having to go through an appointment process and cause undue issues with that, like we saw in 2019.”