BATH — Bath City Council voted to allow the clerk’s office to offer nomination papers once more for one of the at-large council seats again this month after an error was discovered in the first batch circulated earlier this summer.
To correct the problem, nomination papers for a two-year at-large seat on the council are available for Sept. 4 and must be filed between 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 8 and 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 22.
The paperwork allows candidates seeking seats on the city council to gather between 50 and 100 signatures of registered voters in the city in order to get their names on the Nov. 3 ballot.
The seat in question is being vacated by Council Chairperson Mari Eosco, who resigned effective Nov. 4 with two years left of her term.
The city made nomination papers available between July 21 and Aug. 18. City Clerk Darci Wheeler said seven people took out papers and four people returned them with signatures for Eosco’s at-large seat.
One of those people raised a question about the forms, which stated the at-large seat they were seeking was three years instead of two years.
City Solicitor Roger Theriault said Wednesday this is the first time there have been two at-large positions up for election at the same time for different terms. They are normally staggered three-year terms.
“The concern is that without a proper designation of the term that’s up for election, the nomination process is questionable and could be questioned, and there would be no proper nominations for the two-year council seats,” Theriault said.
The city’s charter allows the council to designate a shorter timeframe for making nomination papers available to fill a vacancy via an election, but the paperwork must be in at least 14 days before the election.
The council unanimously agreed to make nomination papers available again for the 2-year at-large council seat.
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