Perth Voice Interactive

An extraordinary election will be held at a cost of $26,000 to fill new Vincent mayor John Carey’s vacant council seat.

WA electoral legislation prevents simply picking the third-best scoring candidates from the October 19 election to fill the third spot.

Mr Carey says there was some confusion about how it would work after Alannah MacTiernan vacated the mayoral seat. No-one had realised a by-election would be needed.

“It was a mistaken presumption,” Mr Carey says. “It was a new scenario that we hadn’t faced before.

“Had I known this situation [would result] I would have resigned as councillor to avoid the expense to ratepayers.”

We asked the top two candidates who just missed out if they were keen to stand again.

James Peart (fourth with 828 votes) says: “It’s a possibility! Can’t confirm at this stage.”

Katrina Montaut (third with 907 votes) says: “I don’t know. I’m getting a lot of people asking me to, and a lot of people expressing their interest in having someone out of the loop that’s been created on council.”

She says it’s a tough decision, “after dealing with some of the not-so-pleasant aspects during the campaign,” but wasn’t keen on providing details about what she was referring to.

VOICE CORRECTIONS: Our reported figures last week on the Vincent mayoral vote were a tad low. We’d only included the votes for one ward. The results were 5342 votes for John Carey and 790 for Angelo Merlacco. Also, Stirling mayor Giovanni Italiano is better known as “John”, not “Joe” as we’d published in a photo caption.