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Green Forest has a new mayor. Sort of.
At the conclusion of a special meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 25, the Green Forest City Council voted unanimously to appoint former mayor Jerry Carlton to serve the remainder of the late Don McNeely’s term as mayor.
McNeely, who was elected as the city’s mayor in November 2022 and took office in January 2023, died Nov. 3 at the age of 73. His term would have expired at the end of 2026.
Carlton served as mayor of Green Forest from 2019 until Mc-Neely took office in 2023. Carlton did not seek re-election in 2022 after being hospitalized for a month in 2021 with COVID-19. Instead, he ran for a seat on the city council and served one two-year term.
During an interview in the mayor’s office on Monday, Dec. 1, Carlton said he had encouraged McNeely to run in 2022. That was one reason he volunteered to serve the remainder of McNeely’s term.
“I actually convinced Don to run back when I was sick, and I feel obligated to finish what he started because of that,” Carlton said. “I’m in a better place than I was then and I just feel obligated to do it more than anything.”
Green Forest city attorney Clint Scheel said before the Nov. 25 city council meeting that the council had two options — appointing someone to serve the remainder of McNeely’s term or passing an ordinance calling for a special election to choose a mayor.
State law had required that a special election be held if more than a year remained on a mayor’s term when they left office, but Carlton said that was no longer the case. The cost of a special election would have been significant.
“The law has changed now,” he said. “Even though there was more than a year left on Don’s term, the law’s changed where you don’t have to hold a special election and you can appoint somebody to fulfill the remaining term. So once they called the county about what a special election was going to cost, the last one that Berryville did in (2023) was $18,000. So we knew it was going to be in that general vicinity of what the cost would be.”
City offices were closed Thursday, Nov. 27, and Friday, Nov. 28, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, so Carlton was still getting his bearings on Monday.
“I’m still trying to figure out what all we need to tackle and what’s been left undone — nothing major,” he said. “I’ve hit the ground running.
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