Colver to resign from borough assembly seat

PALMER — Having apparently won election to the state House of Representatives, Jim Colver said he intends to resign the seat he currently occupies on the Mat-Su Borough Assembly.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Colver said it isn’t feasible to do both jobs, and thus he plans to resign from the assembly.

But what, exactly, does that mean for a succession? According to Mat-Su Borough Clerk Lonnie McKechnie, the rules are actually kind of vague on the topic and say only a couple of things for sure:

It’s up to the assembly to appoint a successor

“Once the resignation is accepted they have 30 days to fill the position,” McKechnie said.

She described 30 days as a “pretty short timeframe” and said that whatever the assembly decides to do with that time — advertise? Conduct interviews? — is up to the body to determine.

“There’s nothing laid out on how we do it, just the timeframe in which we do it,” McKechnie said.

What’s not spelled out in borough code is a process for how interested applicants can apply for consideration, she said. That’s one of the items the assembly will decide, McKechnie said.

The last time the borough replaced an assembly member, she said, was probably in the early 2000s. McKechnie wasn’t clerk then but she worked in the clerk’s office.

“I know that they did some advertising, they interviewed some people. They brought them in and asked them questions,” she said.

Once the assembly had learned what they wanted from the candidates, the assembly took a vote. McKechnie said it’s a simple majority vote but given that the body would be down a member, there’d be six people deciding rather than seven, meaning Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss might end up voting to break a tie.

The district in question — Assembly District 6 — is a relatively large one, stretching from Church Road in the west to Wasilla Creek in the east. It encompasses Hatcher Pass in the north and dips as far south as Spruce Avenue.

Colver was first elected to the assembly in 2000 but left that body in 2006. He returned with a successful run in 2009. In between, Rob Wells — a farmer and former owner of the now defunct Matanuska Creamery — filled that seat and Colver served on the Mat-Su Borough School Board.