Category talk:Christchurch City Councillors

Mayors subcategory

I will remove mayors from the subcategory, as not all mayors have also been councillors. For example, Eden George was never a councillor. Schwede66 09:44, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't the mayor have a vote on council? Mattlore (talk) 10:10, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the mayor has a vote. It's a casting vote at that. And up until 1875, city councillors chose one from their rank as mayor, so you had to be a councillor in the first place before you could become mayor (James Gapes was the first mayor elected at large). But since then, the roles have been mutually exclusive; if you were already a councillor and then managed to get yourself elected as mayor, this creates a vacancy that is being filled via a by-election. That's no longer a problem these days, as we vote for councillor and mayors on the same day, but historically, mayors were voted at the end of the year, and council elections sometime around mid-year.

I looked through all the mayor articles and there were quite a few who were never also city councillors: Eden George, Arthur Rhodes, Tommy Taylor, Henry Wigram, and John Hall fall into that category. I've added the city councillor category to most of the remaining mayor articles; there were three that were stubs, and I'll deal with them when I expand them. I think it's quite a notable distinction whether a person has at other times been a councillor or not. Eden George, for example, had no political experience whatsoever when he became mayor and he was a total flop to the extent that the council did not add his photo to the gallery of past mayors. When, decades later, they decided to add him to the gallery after all, they had to search far and wide to find a suitable photo; all of this is rather ironic, given that George was a rather successful photographer himself. Hence the category distinction. Can you see why I've changed it? Schwede66 18:06, 14 April 2013 (UTC)