The Government Operations Committee of the City of Frederick met on May 15, 2025, at 2:00 PM. The committee, chaired by Councilmember Kazamchak in place of Vice President Shackleford, covered two workshop items: Election Updates and a Post-General Assembly Update. No public comments were made. The meeting lasted approximately one hour.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the May 15th uh meeting of the government operations committee, and we will begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. You may notice that I'm not the normal chair of this committee. Uh Councilmember was gonna say Alderman, Councilmember Vice President Shackleford is otherwise occupied today. He asked me to chair this meeting in his stead, and so it will be Councilmember Kazamchak and I, and we will uh begin with approval of the minutes for May 1st uh committee meeting. Move for approval. I will second all those in favor. That is two zero. On today's workshop, we will be discussing, uh, we'll be hearing uh election updates. We have two presentations. The first one is candidate information and then voter education plan, and to welcome uh we'd like to welcome Phyllis Hain, our city clerk, and Alan Etler, our manager of communications. The show is yours. All right, thank you. Um for the record again, Phyllis Hain, City Clerk. I can lead off with um a little presentation of basically how to run for office in the city of Frederick. So first off, a shout out to our Board of Supervisors of Elections. Um, these are the people who oversee all election operations um in the city of Frederick. Our election dates are the primaries on September 9th, with early voting August 22nd and 23rd. General election November 4th, early voting October 24th and 25th. All in-person voting early and election day will take place at the Trinity Recreation Center at 6040 New Design Road. The reason we only have one in-person um voting center is that we are emphasizing again in this cycle, mail-in voting, a ballot will be mailed to every registered voter, of course, for the primaries as every registered Democrat or Republican. Um there will be drop at least one drop box per district will be available. And of course, also they you can mail them in. You don't have to put them in the drop box. So there are lots of options to get that back to us. So if you want to run for office, the first thing is decide what office you're running for. The office on the ballot uh are the mayor. The mayor is the chief executive of the city and is charged with administering city functions. Serving as mayor is considered a full-time job. The mayor may serve two consecutive four-year terms. To qualify the qualifications to be mayor, you have to be at least 18 years old. You have to have lived in the city for at least one year prior to the general election, and be a registered voter. The other options are the city council. City council is the legislative branch of the city government, responsible for passing ordinances and resolutions. It's considered a part-time job. It's theoretically, I it's a lot of time, but you can keep your day job and be on the city council. Um the council members attend meetings of the whole council and serve on one or more council committees, such as this one. And they may serve three consecutive four-year terms. Um for 2025, there will be seven council seats available. Two will be at large, and five, the other five each one will represent a specific district. The um map of the districts is available in the city, the election page of the city website, um, and also in the lobby. It is displayed in the lobby if anybody wants to stop by and see. Uh so the outlatch council seat uh represents all residents. It will appear on all ballots, and there are two of these seats on the ballot. You for this, you have to be at least 18 years old. You have to have lived in the city for at least one year prior to the general election, and be a registered voter. For the district council seats, um, they represent residents within one of the five districts. Uh they appear only on the ballots of residents in their district, and there is one member per district. Uh to qualify for this, you must be at least 18 years old, live in the city for at least one year. You have to live in the district for which you are running at the time of the election, and be a registered voter.