One thing the City of St. Joseph won’t have to worry about is a lack of people interested in replacing City Commissioner Peggy Getty who is resigning from the Commission due to her family’s relocation to the South Bend area this month. In fact, they’ll have their work cut out for them inasmuch as they have 14 applications for that one soon to be vacant commission seat.
After receiving word at Monday night’s city commission meeting that eight men and six women from the community have all filed the application affidavit and proffered resumes or other statements regarding their interest in taking Getty’s place, the commission faced several possibilities for how to proceed, but eventually settled on a plan teed up by City Attorney Laurie Schmidt to narrow the list to four potential replacements to be interviewed. To get to the four interviewees, each sitting St. Joseph City Commissioner will privately select their personal top four candidates, after which those results will be tabulated to arrive at four finalists.
Following the personal winnowing and tabulation process to achieve a favorite four, the City Commission will host a special meeting at 3:45pm this Thursday to determine who the collective final four will be for formal interviews and those interviews will take place at 5:30pm on Monday, February 15th to arrive at the next commissioner.
Between now and Thursday morning City Clerk Denise Westfall has been instructed by the City Commission to contact each applicant inviting them to submit a paragraph delineating their personal vision and priorities for the city and what each would prefer to see accomplished in service to the city. That was a recommendation from Commissioner Lynn Todman who noted that some applicants provided detailed resumes, but it would be helpful to know what they’d like to see happen in the city where they live.
Here are the fourteen St. Joseph residents who submitted applications by Friday’s deadline (posted by the city alphabetically by first name):
- Anthony Pastrick
- Brook Thomas
- Bruce Gorenflo
- Chris Lannert
- Jason Vetne
- Jean Johnson
- Jessica Altman
- John Chandler
- Kimberly Jorgensen Gane
- Michael Sarola
- Michele Turner-Binkley
- Richard Czopp
- Shawn Hill
- Vedette Palis-Cordes
