Riverside appoints interim council member

The Riverside City Council voted 4-0 to appoint Kevin Mills to fill the City Council seat vacated by Jeanine Redlinger early in June.

“I’ve known Kevin for a long time, and I honestly tried to get him appointed the last time,” said Councilperson Tom Sexton, who made the motion for the appointment. “He understands a lot of the construction type stuff, mechanical type stuff.”

City Clerk Becky LaRoche said the appointment will last until the next city election this November, when the remaining two years of Redlinger’s term are put up for election.

Since Riverside’s council seats are all at-large positions, the two-year seat would be awarded to whichever candidate came in third while the full four-year terms of current Councilpersons Andy McGuire and Tom Sexton will be awarded to voters’ first and second choices.

Per state code, Mill’s appointment could be contested if a petition with sufficient signatures is filed with the city by July 5, kicking off a special election for the seat. That process happened as recently as 2019 with the election of Councilperson Edgar McGuire, but LaRoche said it was unlikely this time.

“The last time was fall, 2018, and the new elected one came on in January 2019,” she said. “If this is the same thing, I don’t think they would even do a special election. The auditor would probably refuse it since we have a normal election in November.”

Though LaRoche didn’t know the exact number required, Iowa Code for a city of Riverside’s size requires at least “15 percent of the voters who voted for candidates for the office at the preceding regular election at which the office was on the ballot.”

Mills questioned the November election, saying LaRoche may have been mislead about the process.

“They’re going by the League of Cities, and I don’t think the League of Cities is telling what Iowa code actually is,” he said. “It’s not a monumental deal, I can rerun in November, that’s absolutely not a problem. My point is, there are procedures to follow.”

Mills said he hoped to make the city operate more by-the-book in several areas, including ordinance enforcement and engineering plans.

“All I want is that when we have to do something, we do our homework,” he said. “You follow what the codes are, regardless of how many steps you’ve got to go through, so everything is the same. Too much inconsistency has happened in the past, I don’t want to see inconsistency.”

Mills said one of his main motivations in vying for the seat was his frustration with recent city projects.

“I want anything that is done to be done right the first time as much as humanly possible,” he said. “Engineers that we had before would go out and do something, then come back and want to build a city without approval. That’s not going to happen. If you want to do something, you need council approval before it gets done.”