Ah, sweet anarchy….
Hartford offers Libertarians and other chaoticians a brief exercise in the disappearance of government. Double-voting city councilman Doyle Johnson resigned last week following controversy over a suspicious e-mail of questionable provenance that Johnson read into the record then deleted in December. With the resignations of councilors Ryan Bortnem and Brad Bjergaard in November, the six-person Hartford City Council is now down to three councilors, which means, they are one councilor shy of a quorum. Hartford City Ordinance 1.0201 (as well as the entirely redundant 1.0210) says the seventh person at the council table, the mayor, can only preside at council meetings and vote to break ties, so embattled mayor Bill Campbell evidently does not count toward that quorum.
Without a quorum, the city can conduct no business. They cannot approve bids on the upcoming pool project. They cannot pay any bills (though city employees are still getting their paychecks). The council did approve the April 12 election date the last time they had a quorum on January 5, but if they don’t fill the vacancies before then (and remarkably, none of the vacancies are seats up for election this year), Hartford won’t be able to canvass the election results and swear in its newly elected members. Hee hee!
One bit of business Hartford’s non-quorum can conduct is the appointment of new members to fill the three vacancies. SDCL 9-13-14.1 says, “If a vacancy exists on a municipal governing body, the remaining members shall appoint a replacement to serve until the next annual municipal election….” It also allows city councils to fill vacancies by special election, but the council nixed that option at its January 5 meeting. For appointments, the statute does not require a quorum, but the use of “the” in front of “remaining members” suggests that appointments must enjoy support of all remaining members.
I faced this situation personally back in 2011, when I was the only remaining member of the three-person Lake Herman Sanitary District board. Sanitary districts, the boards formed in rural areas to build sewer systems, follow the Title 9 municipal statutes where their own Chapter 34A-5 regs are silent. Interestingly, board counsel advised me then that I could unilaterally call an election and write checks to pay bills.
One would think that, given the active participation of local boosters in recent city council meetings and in debates about Hartford’s economic development, one would think there would be plenty of locals eager to assume decision-making roles. Waiting two months to deal with the November resignations was marginally tolerable on their bare-minimum four-person quorum, but now that Johnson has resigned, the remaining Hartford City Council members should accelerate their efforts to talk to their neighbors, find replacements, and get the city back to normal business… unless, of course, their secret economic development plan is to get all of the Libertarians in the state to move to Hartford and set up party headquarters there.