One side effect of Tuesday’s “blue wave” is the creation of some vacant municipal offices as the election’s winners assume the state and county-level posts that they’ve secured.
One of these imminent openings is a post on Burlington’s city council that currently belongs to newly-elected state representative Ian Baltutis.
It was barely a year ago that Baltutis nabbed a regular, four-year term on the council following a four-year hiatus from politics that began when he lost his former position as the city’s mayor in 2021. Under state law, the council’s remaining members will have an opportunity to appoint a successor until the next round of city council elections take place in the fall of 2027.
The selection of someone to replace Baltutis has posed quite a conundrum for Burlington’s mayor Beth Kennett, who has been a close political ally of the councilman-turned-legislator-elect.
“What I would like to do is to have someone with the same gifts and skills that Ian has brought to the council,” Kennett explained in an interview Wednesday. “But the first thing we should do is to sit down as a council and talk about the [selection] process.”
Burlington’s previous council members have generally solicited applications from the community to fill openings in its membership. The applicants are then vetted by the council’s remaining members who, in at least one instance, held public interviews with the finalists before they made their selection.
In some cases, the council has found itself drawn to the first runner up from the previous council race as a potential contender to replace a departed member. In this case, the candidate in question is Donna M. Vanhook, who placed third in the same four-way race where Baltutis led the field in 2025. Kennett concedes that, while in some ways, Vanhook is the polar opposite of Baltutis, she could be a potential contender to succeed him.
“That’s a conversation I would have to have with her,” Kennett said. “I don’t even know if she’s interested at this point.”
Kennett went on to acknowledge that Baltutis’ departure could provide an opportunity for the council to resume a conversation it began over the summer about a potential expansion in the group’s five-person membership and even the possible introduction of district elections.
An early supporter of the district model, Kennett noted that her subsequent conversations with residents have revealed a certain chariness about the potential for gerrymandering. The mayor expressed no similar concerns, however, about the prospect of a two-seat expansion, which the council generally favored when the idea came up at a retreat earlier this year. She added that she’d have to check with the city manager and city attorney to see if this possible change could be pursued in the wake of Baltutis’ elevation to the state house.
“We may have an opportunity to do that,” she added. “But the immediate issue we have is to fill the vacancy in the next couple of months.”
Mebane
In Mebane, city officials have not decided how, or whether, to proceed to fill the vacancy created by the election of city councilman Sean C. Ewing to the board of commissioners; Ewing had been reelected to a four-year term on the city council in 2023.
As in Burlington, the council has sometimes turned to the runner-up from the most recent municipal election to fill a vacancy.
However, in Mebane, there were no other candidates on the ballot when Ewing was reelected in 2023 (along with Katie Burkholder). This past November, there were three incumbents who were reelected: long-time councilman Tim Bradley, as well as Montrena Hadley and Jonathan White. Two other candidates, Blair Helms and Rick Thomas, both said a few weeks before the 2025 election that they had withdrawn or were no longer pursuing a seat on the council, but still appeared on the ballot; they received 241 and 201 votes, respectively, compared to the winners (Hadley, Bradley, and White) who received 1,114, 881, and 819, respectively.
Another option available to both councils is simply to leave the vacant seat unfilled until the November 2027 election and to let the voters decide whom to select.
Contacted Wednesday, Mebane mayor Ed Hooks said he was inclined to “let the dust settle” after Ewing’s election to the board of commissioners.
There will not be another Mebane city council meeting prior to the morning of Monday, December 7 when the commissioners are scheduled to meet to swear in Ewing and other newly-elected Democrats; the Mebane council will hold its monthly meeting that same night.
