Running for Office, February of 2022

Most people in the city government had known for some time that Jeff wanted to become mayor.  From the time it became clear that Jeff was being dishonest, and I came to realize that I couldn’t look the other way, I knew that Jeff’s campaign in 2022 would be a horrible time for me. 

I felt I couldn’t let him run for mayor, or even for reelection to his old council seat, without informing the voters about what I had seen from him.  But just informing the voters wasn’t going to be enough if there was not a reasonable alternative on the ballot.  I started having conversations with several citizens trying to encourage them to run for office, but nobody seemed willing to run. 

After months of hearing “no” from potential candidates, in January I heard that Ted Kinzer was considering running.  I reached out to him and he said he had decided not to run.  I was under considerable strain, worrying that Jeff was going to run unopposed and then nothing I could say would matter.  I heavily considered running against him myself, but, thankfully, Ted changed his mind and called to tell me that he had filed to run for mayor. 

It was such a relief that the voters would have a reasonable alternative to consider.

There were three seats coming up in 2022: Jeff’s; the mayor’s; and Cullen King’s.  Cullen and Mike both announced that they weren’t running again, and since Jeff was vacating his seat to run for mayor there were three races for council seats.  I called around to people involved in the city to find out if the candidates for the other seats were going to align with Jeff’s side of the council.  I learned that both leading candidates for the council seats were good people, well respected by many, but that they both had close ties to Jeff’s side of the council. 

It was concerning because that meant that they could easily be manipulated as so many people had already been.  Not that I thought they were bad people, at all, and I don’t mean to imply that.  It was that they were likely to trust the people they were close to, people whom I had once trusted but had come to learn were not trustworthy.  They were people who were sweeping Jeff’s misconduct under the rug for him.

I felt I had an obligation to recount for the voters events that only I had seen and heard.  One of the seats already had two candidates, so I filed to run as a second candidate for the other seat.