What if you held an election and nobody ran?

Amador City has come up two candidates short for filling the four seats available on the city council in today's election. The only seat on the council not up for election belongs to incumbent Tim Knox. Appointed incumbent Aaron Brusatori has thrown his hat into the ring for the seat he is presently occupying and Amador City resident and realtor Michael Vasquez is making his first bid for elected office.

Vasquez is running for the two-year term made available by former Councilman Kirk Lindsay's resignation earlier this year. "I want to help make Amador City a vibrant, exciting destination," Vasquez said. "The city is going to be going through changes. Our county and the country are going through changes. I want to be part of the process."

Brusatori, Vasquez and Knox will be a council of three elected officials as soon as the Amador County Board of Supervisors certifies the election results. Amador City Clerk Joyce Davidson has been through this before. "Last time," she recalled, "the new council members were seated in December."

Once the new council is certified and seated, they will have to begin the process that will lead to appointing two more people to the council. "They (the three council members) will direct the clerk to post notices on the town's bulletin boards," Davidson explained. The notices will inform the residents of Amador City that there are two seats open on the city council and that applications must be filed by a certain date.

According to Davidson, five residents have expressed an interest in serving on the council. Two are willing, though reluctant, former city council members: Susan Bragstad and Hope Luxemberg. Both have said that they don't want to risk the city's disincorporation. Davidson was unwilling to reveal the names of the other three interested residents.

"I don't really want to do it," Bragstad admitted, "but I already go to all the meetings, so..." Bragstad was on the council from 1988 until 2000, serving three of those years as mayor.

Luxemberg looked back on her years of council membership as consisting of very long hours devoted to caring for the tiny city's needs. True to her name, she expressed hope that two concerned and capable people from the community would rise to the occasion.

If all goes as expected, the new five-member city council is expected to be in place by January.

The situation in Amador City has given rise to conjecture about the possibility of electing people to the city council by writing their names in today. The California Elections Code precludes that in Section 15341, which states: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no name written upon a ballot in any election shall be counted for an office or nomination unless the candidate whose name has been written on the ballot has complied with Part 3 (commencing with Section 8600) of Division 8."

Briefly, Section 8600 states that write-in candidates face requirements similar to those for other candidates, including presentation of signatures from voters in the jurisdiction and filing 14 days prior to the election. For Amador City City Council, no one has filed as a write-in candidate.