Election snafu in small Johnson County city prompts write-in campaigns for mayor

Spring Hill voters are facing an unusual situation in next week’s election, where the one candidate listed for mayor is not expected to take office if she wins.

On Nov. 4, voters will elect candidates to the City Council and to the office of mayor in the town of 10,000 straddling Johnson and Miami counties. The one candidate listed for mayor will be Kristin Feeback, who was elected to the City Council in 2023.

But according to the Johnson County Post, Feeback announced in July that she accepted a new job that will require her family to move from Spring Hill after May 2026, meaning she would no longer be eligible to serve as mayor. Her announcement came months before the election and when a new mayor would be sworn in.

Feeback has become the CEO of Beacon Mental Health, which is based in Kansas City’s Northland in Missouri.

The filing deadline for the election was in June, so Feeback was unable to remove herself from the ballot. Current mayor Joe Berkey, who was appointed in 2022, is not running for re-election.

She said at a council meeting in August that she would not take the seat if she ended up winning the most votes in the election. That would leave a vacancy for mayor in January.

In that situation, under new rules passed by the council last year, the City Council would select a council president, who would fill the vacancy and become mayor. That person would serve until the election in 2027, when voters would elect someone to be mayor for a fresh four-year term.

That would then leave a vacancy for a City Council seat, for which the new mayor and City Council would appoint someone to the role. The council would also select a new council president.

Feeback previously said she would stay in her current council seat until May to be a part of the appointment process.

The city council could now be faced with making appointments soon after an election, which was at the root of controversy in 2021.

Write-in candidates emerge

But that scenario may not play out, because a write-in candidate could instead win the most votes.

Rodolfo Arevalo and Chad Young have announced write-in campaigns for mayor, meaning voters will have to write one of their names on the ballot if they want to vote for them.

Young is currently a City Council member, serving as president, and was elected in 2023. If he wins and becomes mayor, that would leave a vacancy on the council. He said on his campaign page that he would only accept the position of mayor if elected through write-in votes.

Arevalo, a member of the city’s planning commission, is on the ballot for the upcoming City Council election, but he told the Post that he would accept the mayor seat and not a City Council seat if he were to win both.

Arevalo is on the ballot for both a regular City Council term and a two-year City Council term, alongside his write-in campaign for mayor. It was not immediately clear what would happen if he wins election to multiple seats.

Previous snafu

Spring Hill voters faced another unusual election scenario in 2021, after Tyler Graves was elected mayor that year.

Graves abruptly announced days later that he would give up his City Council seat and would not take on the mayor role as his family moved out of state.

Controversy over the process to appoint a new mayor led to dissenting City Council member Sean Owen to protest and refuse to attend meetings. That paralyzed the council and left it from conducting regular business.

Owen later resigned.

The council has since approved new rules that reduce the amount of time between an appointment of a mayor to fill a vacancy and another election to the seat.