Despite missing councilman, Johnson County mayor appoints new leader amid controversy

The beleaguered Spring Hill City Council appointed a new member Thursday night over the objections of a councilman who has vanished from the public eye in a failed bid to thwart the move.

New Councilman Chad Young was appointed after the council discovered a technicality allowing them to fill the seat, regardless of Councilman Steve Owen’s ongoing protest, as fallout from the mayoral election last fall continues to dog the small town.

The controversy began when former councilman Tyler Graves won the race for mayor in November, but shocked the town by announcing days later that he would vacate both his council seat and the mayor’s job as his family moved out of state. The surprise move put two seats on the council up for grabs after ballots were already cast and counted, leaving some residents suspicious of city leaders’ plans.

New council member Joe Berkey was selected to take over as mayor earlier this month, despite Owen’s objections that he should have assumed the top spot as the previous council president, and Owen has gone missing since in an attempt to prevent the council from taking any votes.

Although the logjam broke Thursday with Young’s appointment, a frustrated Berkey accused Owen of holding the city “hostage” by boycotting near-daily council meetings, including Thursday’s proceedings, and suggested the missing councilman could face penalties for neglecting his oath of office.

“We cannot continue to have all city business held hostage by the refusal of a council member to show up or communicate directly with me or the governing body,” Berkey said Thursday night, reading from a written statement.

“I have chosen not to take legal action against Councilman Owen for the willful neglect of his duties and his oath of office,” Berkey continued. “I will not waste the city’s resources and therefore its taxpayers thousands of additional dollars in legal expenses. I made every effort to include Councilman Owen in the appointment process. I am unwilling to delay the conduct of the people’s business any longer.”

Election controversy

The small town of 8,000 on the southern edge of Johnson County has been gripped by the election controversy since Graves, then-owner of the popular The Bean coffee shop in downtown Spring Hill, won the mayoral election, but announced he would not take office due to “unforeseen circumstances” and his family’s move to Florida.

After the resignation, The Star reported Graves and his wife had sold their business and began the process to sell the family’s home long before Election Day. The last-minute twist has left some residents suspicious that the timing of Graves’ departure was planned as a way to consolidate political power through council appointments, instead of residents’ votes in the general election.

Those accusations came to a head earlier this month when Owen cast the lone vote against Berkey’s appointment as mayor on Jan. 10 and dramatically left the council meeting, leaving behind a note accusing his colleagues of violating the city charter and demanded the release of several legal opinions issued by the city attorney.

Owen has not been seen publicly or communicated substantively with city officials since.

He has ducked all attempts by city officials to contact him and skipped each of the council’s nine attempts to hold a meeting over the past three weeks — an apparent play to prevent the five-seat council from having enough members present to cast any votes, including new member appointments.

But the procedural chess game broke wide open Thursday night when the shorthanded council, jilted again by Owen, decided to proceed with one new appointment anyway through a technicality discovered by city attorney Charles Dunlay.

Despite city officials’ initial belief that all three current council members Owen, Brian Peel and Diana Roth would have to be present to constitute the majority of the council that is necessary to cast votes, Dunlay cited decades-old case law and state statute that use the phrase “remaining councilmen.”

With Graves’ former council seat vacant, also left empty by his resignation, and Berkey’s council seat now empty because of his elevation to mayor, Dunlay told Peele and Roth that they technically constituted a majority of the sitting council members.

“There are three remaining council members ... thus a quorum of that body is two,” Dunlay said.

The pair immediately voted to approve the appointment of Young, a lending officer at a local bank who did not run for the council during last year’s election, to fill Graves’ former council seat. Young was sworn in on the spot, took a seat on the dais and the council began its first formal meeting in almost three weeks.

Legal opinions

After a brief session behind closed doors, the new council voted to waive its attorney-client privilege on two legal opinions issued by Dunlay that Owen had demanded be released publicly when he left the Jan. 10 meeting. Both were made available publicly Friday morning.

The first detailed the procedural reasons why Owen, as the previous council president, was not in line to ascend to the mayorship when Graves did not take office this month. The second outlines Dunlay’s opinion that newly elected Councilman Peel does not have a conflict of interest on the council while continuing in his full-time job as recreation director for the Spring Hill Recreation Commission, a separate board not funded by or overseen by the city.

Although some supporters believed the release would encourage Owen to return to city meetings, it was not clear Friday when or if Owen would return to the council. Multiple attempts by The Star to reach him over the past three weeks have been unsuccessful, including Friday morning.

Berkey confided in a room full of critics earlier this month that he also felt caught in “a terrible situation” and that he hoped a path around Owen’s blockade could move the city beyond the controversy.

Some residents still feel burned, however, and have asked Berkey to appoint either Roy Riffel and Arevalo Rodolfo, who both ran unsuccessful campaigns last year, to smooth over the crisis. With Young’s appointment Thursday, the council must still make one more appointment to fill Berkey’s open council seat.

“I did not move to Spring Hill to deal with petty politics,” resident Shane Johnson said. “I don’t think there’s any necessarily nefarious underlying conspiracy situation going on. I really hope that the council and the mayor really stick to what they say. I didn’t vote for any of you, to be honest, but we’re all vested in the success of the city and I really hope you take to heart what the citizens have to say and not want to play politics.”