Salem City Council Takes First Steps To Replace Mayor Kim Driscoll

SALEM, MA — The process to replace outgoing Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll — who last week was elected as the state's next lieutenant governor — got underway Monday night when the Salem City Council in a special council meeting referred the Committee of the Whole several amendments to a long-unused charter to replace the city's highest elected official.

The City Council voted to send the series of amendments — mostly to update the process to current practices and eliminate archaic terms — to the Salem City Council of the Whole at its meeting on Thursday (6:10 p.m.) where public comment will be allowed.

"The purpose of sending this to Committee (of the Whole) is to have the whole process very public, very transparent, allow people to hear this conversation and the reasoning from the City Solicitor's office," Salem City Council Chair Patricia Morsillo said, "with the listing of all the amendments proposed in the (state) home-rule petition in order for the city to move forward with a special election that works for us, and to clean up the language in our charter.

"This is an open process. We are not trying to cut off comments. This is moving it to Committee where a better conversation, a fuller conversation can happen, with public comment, with questions and answers from the city solicitor, and others who will be at that meeting."

Among the changes up for discussion is to update the gap between any preliminary special election to the general election from three weeks in the charter to between six and eight weeks to account for current practices such as mail-in voting.

The updates will also affect filling any void on the City Council that might arise from one of those City Councilors being elected as the next mayor.

Under the timeline that City Clerk Ilene Simons released last week, upon Driscoll's official resignation, the City Council will appoint an acting mayor in January, who will serve until a special election can be held.

The acting mayor would then revert back to his or her seat on the City Council once the new mayor is in place.

While most of the amendment language appears to be perfunctory, one area that could generate discussion would be the replacement procedure of any ward councilor who may run for mayor and ultimately win the special election.

The changes are needed to provide a home rule petition for state approval that will allow the city to properly conduct the special election — which Simons told Patch last week appears to be on track for this spring — once Driscoll moves on to Beacon Hill.

Driscoll is the first mayor to resign her petition since the city moved to a four-year term. She was first elected in 2006 and was re-elected to a fifth term in 2021, two months before announcing her bid for lieutenant governor.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza)