Curt Skoog would have to give up his seat as Overland Park’s mayor if he becomes governor of Kansas, creating a vacancy for the top elected official in Johnson County’s largest city.
Skoog is one of three candidates vying for the Democratic Party nomination for the governor’s race, all of whom hail from Johnson County. Whoever wins the Aug. 4 primary will then face off with the winner of the Republican primary, which currently features more than a half dozen candidates, in November.
If Skoog, who is less than a year into his second term as mayor, ultimately becomes governor of Kansas, then the council president would become acting mayor temporarily, though a series of elections would have to follow.
How does it all work?
Vacancies on city councils aren’t that out of the ordinary, but they are rare in Johnson County, and rarer still is a mid-cycle vacancy in the mayoral seat.
After Skoog’s last-minute entry into the race for Kansas governor, Holly Grummert, who serves on the Overland Park City Council, told the Post that city staff sent members of the city council an informational email containing the applicable city rules about the process as a sort of refresher.
Overland Park’s Charter Ordinance — the collection of city rules used to establish local control of a jurisdiction’s government that also touches on a range of matters, like bond authority and the role of the city council — lays out specifically how a mayoral vacancy should be handled.
Meg Ralph, director of strategic communication for Overland Park, said that process will “ensure continuity in leadership should the mayor become Kansas’ next governor.”
If Skoog wins the election, then as soon as he resigns, the city council president would become the acting mayor. The city council typically picks a new council president annually, and Councilmember Melissa Cheatham currently holds the position.
Then, the city council would have 30 days to pick and confirm a sitting councilmember to fill the role of interim mayor. That would create a vacancy in that person’s city council seat, since an individual cannot be a councilmember and mayor at the same time, and that role would be filled through an appointment process.
Since more than two years would be left in Skoog’s mayoral term, a special election would have to be held in 2027, likely alongside regularly scheduled city council races that year, Ralph said. The winner would serve a shortened two-year term to complete Skoog’s unfinished term.
Then, in 2029, the regularly-scheduled Overland Park mayoral election would occur in the fall municipal elections. Whoever wins that would serve a full, four-year term.
Grummert said the whole process sounds pretty grueling, assuming one person becomes interim mayor, then runs for the seat in the 2027 special election and again in the 2029 general election. She described whoever would hypothetically do all that campaigning in back-to-back municipal elections as a “poor soul.”
(Though there are a few exceptions, in Kansas, nonpartisan municipal elections for city council and school board seats are held in odd years, like 2025 and 2027, while partisan legislative, congressional, senate and gubernatorial elections are held in even years, like this year.)
Overland Park has filled city council vacancies before
To fill a city council vacancy, a City Council Vacancy Screening Committee is formed, which is comprised of the mayor, council president and the chair of the Overland Park City Council Finance, Administration and Economic Development Committee.
That special committee is tasked with recommending potential replacements to the full city council within 30 days of the vacancy’s creation, which will either be confirmed or rejected by the city council.
That process would be followed to fill the regular seat of the councilmember who becomes the interim mayor before the special election can be held. However, in the case of Skoog becoming governor, the vacancy committee would include the chair of the finance committee, the interim mayor and a new council president.
Councilmember Grummert, who was first elected to the city council in 2019, has seen other appointment processes on the city council. Specifically, she pointed to 2020, when then-Councilmember Gina Burke moved out of Overland Park and could not complete her term on the city council. Burke was first elected in 2017, and her seat was scheduled to come up on the fall 2021 ballot.
Looking back on that, Grummert recalls that it was all kind of “weird,” and she described it as “wild times,” trying to fill the vacancy in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and in that specific set of circumstances.
She also remembers that a good number of people were interested in the seat and applied, but ultimately, the city council picked Stacie Gram. Gram served in the seat until now-former Councilmember Scott Mosher beat her in the 2021 city council election. Mosher then lost his reelection bid in 2025 to Councilmember Amy Antrim.
Other JoCo cities have recently had to fill mayoral vacancies
In the past several years, more than one Johnson County city has had to fill vacancies in their mayoral seat, though each city handles it differently, depending on their own city codes and ordinances.
In August 2020, longtime Olathe Mayor Michael Copeland died unexpectedly, less than one year into his sixth term. Under that city’s rules, then-Councilmember John Bacon became acting mayor because he was the mayor pro tem.
Bacon served as acting mayor for the remainder of Copeland’s term, then was elected to the role in 2023.
The Spring Hill City Council also had to appoint a mayor after the 2021 municipal elections because now-former Councilmember Tyler Graves, who won that race, had moved out of state.
Graves resigned his city council seat and became ineligible to assume the mayoral position, which triggered something of a crisis that led to more city council resignations, disputes about the city’s charter and quorum issues.
Eventually, newly-elected councilmember Joe Berkey was named council president in 2022, and then promptly became mayor of Spring Hill (the situation was a key topic of discussion in the Post’s candidate forum last fall). Berkey, who decided not to run for the office in 2025, held the position until Chad Young, his successor, was sworn in earlier this year.
Keep reading: ‘Foolhardy’ or ‘extremely thoughtful’? Colleagues, opponents react to Mayor Skoog’s governor’s race bid
