On party-line vote, Wichita City Council fails to replace disgraced former colleague
.JPG "Former television reporter Jared Cerullo addresses the Wichita City Council, asking them to vote for him to replace James Clendenin. Cerullo got the most votes, three, but fell short of the four he’d need to win.")
The Wichita City Council failed to pick a new member Tuesday after five rounds of voting to replace disgraced former council member James Clendenin, meaning the vacant seat will stay that way until at least March 16.
The council remained deadlocked with three replacement candidates getting votes: former TV reporter Jared Cerullo, Sedgwick County Democratic Party Chairman Joseph Shepard and Cindy Miles, a planning commissioner and executive director of the Nonprofit Chamber.
Although council positions are technically nonpartisan, all five rounds of voting on a prospective new member split 3-2-1 along party lines:
▪ Council members Bryan Frye, Becky Tuttle and Jeff Blubaugh, who are all Republicans, voted for Cerullo, a Republican.
▪ Mayor Brandon Whipple voted for Shepard, along with council member Brandon Johnson. Both are Democrats and Johnson’s wife Danielle serves with Shepard as the vice chair of the local Democratic Party.
▪ Cindy Claycomb, a former Republican and now registered independent voter, was the lone council member supporting Miles, who is a Republican.
Neighborhood activist George Theoharis and former police officer Virgil Miller didn’t get any votes.
The council has to pick one of the five, who were the finalists to emerge from preliminary screening by the advisory board in council District 3, which represents parts of south Wichita.
To win, the successful candidate would need support from four of the six current council members.
Under the city procedure, council members vote five times and if no candidate gets majority support, the voting stops and continues at the next meeting.
The council does not have a meeting scheduled next week, so the next opportunity to fill the seat will come March 16.
The District 3 council seat is vacant because of the resignation of Clendenin, who stepped down in December over his role in a scandal involving a false attack ad targeting Whipple in the 2019 mayoral race.
The ad, which falsely accused Whipple of sexual harassment while he was a state legislator, was launched through an anonymous New Mexico limited-liability company and contributions were funneled through a nonprofit sports charity to shield the identities of the politicians and donors involved.
But an Eagle investigation and a defamation lawsuit by Whipple linked Clendenin to the false ad, along with former state Rep. Michael Capps and former Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, who were both voted out of office during re-election bids last year.
Clendenin sought to ride out the controversy, but pressure grew for him to leave after a secretly made audio recording surfaced in October that captured Clendenin, O’Donnell and Capps — all Republicans — plotting to shift the blame for their actions to then-Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman Dalton Glasscock.
The district attorney investigated and announced he would bring formal ouster proceedings to remove Clendenin from office for misconduct if he didn’t resign.
This story was originally published March 2, 2021 at 11:42 AM.
