Who should elect the mayor of Lynchburg?
The city charter is clear: The seven council members select one of their own.
The politics of the matter are more confusing.
When Republicans took a 5-2 majority on the council after the 2022 elections, that majority split into two factions — or maybe it was already split into two factions that the public just hadn’t realized. In the lead-up to the vote, Rep. Bob Good lobbied Republican council members to elect longtime council member Jeff Helgeson as mayor.
Instead, when that new council organized in January 2023, it voted 4-3 to name newly elected at-large council member Stephanie Reed as mayor, with Ward IV council member Chris Faraldi as vice mayor.
The configuration of that vote has long rankled some Republicans in Lynchburg: Those four council members on the winning side included two Republicans (Faraldi and Reed) and two others generally identified as Democrats (MaryJane Dolan and Sterling Wilder). That meant that even though Republicans had a majority on the council, and most of those Republicans voted for Helgeson, a different Republican mayor became mayor.
Over the past two years, the council has been embroiled in factional infighting, much of which seems to stem from that initial vote.
Now we’ve another election in November that has expanded the Republican majority to 6-1 and brought two new Republican members onto the council. Only three of the four votes that elected Reed as mayor remain on the council, which raises the question of where she could find a fourth vote to retain her position.
It’s been assumed that Marty Misjuns and the two council newcomers, Curt Diemer and Jacqueline Timmer, won’t vote for Reed when the new council organizes on Jan. 3. (Misjuns has long criticized Reed; Diemer said during the campaign that the vote to elect her was a “cow patty pie.” Timmer has been silent on the matter but during the campaign passed up opportunities to praise Reed.)
That’s left the other Republican council member, Larry Taylor, as the wild card. He’s avoided the factional fighting; he voted once to censure Misjuns, but voted against the second censure. If there are three votes for Reed, and three votes for someone else, then Taylor would hold the deciding vote.
He hasn’t said and was unavailable to talk over the weekend about a request to talk about the vote for mayor; he did send word he’d be available Monday. In the meantime, someone, it’s unclear who, has created a “Larry Taylor for Mayor of Lynchburg” page. The speculation has been that the anti-Reed faction would like to make Taylor mayor, since they may not have the votes to elevate one of their own.
The latest development: Diemer, Misjuns and Timmer have now signed a pledge to only vote for a Republican who can win the votes for four of the six Republicans. That would seem to set the stage for electing Taylor, since he might attract four Republican votes if he wanted the job, and rule out Reed, because it seems unlikely that any of the three signees would back her.
This may not change the basic dynamics — three votes presumably for Reed, three against, one undeclared — but does shed some light on the behind-the-scenes machinations over the mayorship.
The pledge signed by Diemer, Misjuns and Timmer points out that “selecting leadership for City Council with less than four Republican votes would allow Democrat Sterling Wilder to decide the Mayor and Vice Mayor, undermining the mandate delivered by voters.”
In a text message, Timmer explained her position this way: “The voters made their voice clear this past election by expanding the Republican majority to 6:1. As such, the Republican caucus should determine council leadership like what we see in Congress or the House of Delegates.”
In a telephone interview, Diemer said much the same. He wants to see a Republican mayor elected with a majority of Republican votes. “We’ve got six Republicans; we have an opportunity to have Republicans select who our leadership is.” Diemer said the document was a “joint effort.”
I also reached out to Misjuns but didn’t hear back. Neither was I able to reach Wilder, who, as the lone Democrat on the new council, would be left out of any plan to have a majority of the six Republicans (and therefore a majority of the new council) agree on who the mayor should be.
Reed and Faradi said none of the Republicans who had signed the pledge had approached them to sign it — even though the signatures on the document were dated Dec. 3 and 4.
“I just found out about this document on December 12th when someone mentioned it to me in a casual conversation because they assumed I knew about it,” Reed said in a statement. “Other than that I have no further comments.”
Faraldi said he also didn’t learn about the pledge until late last week. “The public deserves to know who the authors are and when they had planned on sharing it,” he said in a statement. “Instead of bringing us all to the table for an open and honest deliberation, this was created in the shadows and would have surely been used to pressure those of us who dare to think for ourselves into compliance. Governing Lynchburg is not a game to be played in a secret, smoke-filled room by a select-few of political insiders — a cabal — it is a serious job that requires serious leaders to make serious and transparent decisions with integrity and courage. I will not dignify this unserious, underhanded ploy with any further comment.”
None of this seems likely to improve relations between the two Republican factions that state party chair Rich Anderson has been trying to mediate.
Timmer is correct, though: In Washington and Richmond, the majority party determines which of its members it will support for, say, speaker of the House and then the party rallies behind that choice. The minority party doesn’t really have a say.
However, this is an unusual approach at the municipal level in Virginia. In fact, I’ve never heard of it. Then again, most cities aren’t as politicized and partisan on the city council as Lynchburg is.
Virginia has 38 independent cities. Of those, 22 elect their mayors directly, 16 don’t. Of the cities that have council members choose one of their own to be mayor, Lynchburg is by far the biggest — population 79,009 in the last census. The next biggest in that category is Harrisonburg, population 51,814, followed by Charlottesville, population 46,553.
Those council votes for a mayor are generally unanimous and noncontroversial. There are a few exceptions: In 2020, two Charlottesville council members abstained rather than reelect Nikuyah Walker, who had generated controversy. In 2022, Lloyd Snook was elected mayor on a 3-2 vote. In 2024, the Charlottesville council unanimously chose Juandiego Wade. After the 2020 election, the Salem City Council chose Renee Turk as mayor on a 3-2 vote. Charlottesville is dominated by Democrats but Salem isn’t a particularly useful comparison here because, until recently, its candidates have generally run as independents. That split vote on the Salem council wasn’t driven by parties but by other divisions on council.
The philosophical question here for Lynchburg is how partisan a city council should be, and whether the council should look to Washington and Richmond as models for how to operate. The practical question is who the next mayor should be — should that be Reed or someone else? And how should that decision be arrived at? Parties in Congress and the General Assembly can caucus privately because laws requiring open meetings don’t apply to them; they do to members of local governments.
If Lynchburg voters have thoughts, well, those really don’t matter much. It’s not their choice, it’s the council’s. If people in Lynchburg care who should be elected mayor, it seems they should let Taylor know.
The politics of 250 years ago
This month marks the 250th anniversary of a landmark event in American history that most of us never learned about in school: The time when Virginia soldiers returning home from fighting Native Americans along the Ohio River declared they were also willing to fight for American liberty. They met in a camp in Ohio and passed a resolution called the Fort Gower Resolves that made them the first to make such a declaration. That’s one of the things we’ll look at in this month’s edition of Cardinal 250, our history project that looks at the little-known aspects of Virginia’s role in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, which turns 250 years old in 2026.
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