The City of Bolivar announced on Friday, February 21 that they would hold a special meeting to discuss “The City of Bolivar Charter, Article 3, Section 3.10: Political Activity Prohibited.”
“It’s so vague and then the state charter says something different. Then there’s the U.S. Constitution, so it becomes a fight between what do we do? Do we fight the charter? Do we got against the state? Or do we go against the U.S. Constitution? I say the U.S. Constitution always takes precedent over any other documents,” said Miller.
Caroline Miller, city councilperson for Bolivar decided to submit her paperwork to run for city mayor on February 19. However the chairperson of election shares that Miller was supposed to resign from her current position prior to running for mayor, this is due to their charter.
The charter says in part:
“Be it further enacted, that no officer or employee of the city, other than the mayor and councilmen, shall continue in the employment of the city after becoming a candidate for nomination or election to any city office. Any member of the council of the city of bolivar, that desires to run for the office of mayor shall resign their position on said council prior to qualifying for the mayor’s office unless such council member’s term expires on the first day of July following the election.”
“We run in two different cycles, four of us run with the mayor and then 2 years later four of us run with just the council. So I am on that group that runs with just the council, and I said that’s just not fair,” said Miller.
This charter has been put in place since 1996, however, no one has challenged this. Miller and other city councilmen say they believe this charter should be removed.
“I think we decided it should just be deleted because it shouldn’t be that way. Everyone should have the opportunity to stay on the board and run for whatever position because if you think about it what if four of us decided to run do all of us have to resign?” said Miller.
Monday night, the city councilmen have made a vote on how to move forward with the election commission.
“We’ve decided that we’re just not going to advise the election commission one way or the other. We’re just abstaining and staying out of it, which I think a lot of municipalities do. Because we found out a lot of cities, even the city of Memphis, have this in their charter but they just ignore it people just run,” said Miller.
To read the entire charter, click here.
The next city council meeting for Bolivar will be on Monday, March 24 at the Bolivar Municipal Center.
