AUGUST 27, 2009 ISSUE
Leigh Appointed To Fill Aycock’s Seat on Council
Jamie Leigh has been appointed to serve on the Boone Town Council through December.
Jamie Leigh, a Boone accountant, has been appointed to serve the remainder of the Boone Town Council term vacated by Liz Aycock on June 30. The Town Council voted 3-1 to appoint Leigh to the seat at the start of the council’s August 20 monthly meeting.
District Court Judge Greg Horne presided over the swearing-in ceremony, and Leigh took her seat on the council immediately afterward.
The council announced that it would accept applications for Aycock’s seat at its July meeting. In addition to Leigh, Hersey C. “Mac” Forehand, director of the Boone Convention & Visitors Bureau and a former Town Council candidate, applied for the seat. Council Members Lynne Mason, Janet Pepin and Rennie Brantz voted in favor of Leigh’s appointment, while Council Member Stephen Phillips voted for Forehand.
Leigh, a 17-year resident of Boone, has also filed to run for one of three open seats on the council in the November 3 municipal election.
“I am confident I have the skills and experience necessary to smoothly step in and quickly become an active and productive council member,” Leigh wrote in her application. “My professional background is in accounting and finance, knowledge that I believe would be particularly relevant at a time when Boone…is being forced to make tough choices about how to best use limited financial resources.” Leigh has been a certified public accountant since 1997.
Mason said she has only met Leigh recently but feels she has “great vision” and “great initiative” and that she has done a lot of preparation to allow her to step into the position.
In his application, Forehand wrote that he sought the appointment to educate himself in the workings of town government and to serve his community.
“An interim appointment would help council avoid appearance of favoring a candidate running in November,” said Forehand, who is not a candidate in this year’s town council election.
Before the vote, Pepin asked town attorney Sam Furgiuele if there were any legal issues involved in appointing someone to town council who is a candidate in an upcoming election. Furgiuele said he was aware of none.
Aycock was elected to a two-year term on the Boone Town Council in 2007. She resigned from the council after she and her husband moved outside of the Boone town limits. State law dictates that once a municipal office holder moves outside of the corporate limits of the town, that office holder’s seat is then considered to be vacant.
Leigh will serve the remainder of Aycock’s term, which expires in December.
“I’m very excited about it,” Leigh said last Friday. “I am happy to have been selected.”
As to any advantage the appointment might give her as a candidate heading into the November election, Leigh said, “It might. I assume name recognition will be a plus.”
But, she added, “Truthfully, it’s not why I did it. I really want to participate on the council both short term and long term.”
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