Ward 1 Council member Ramey Johnson will be running for re-election in 2017 because her first partial term (2011-2013) was less than two years. This is significant because the Lakewood City Charter establishes a limit of two (four-year) terms.  In the case of a partial term, the charter says if the term served is “at least half” of a regular four-year term then it will be treated as a four-year term.  Since her partial term was a few days short of two years it didn’t qualify as being “at-least half” of a term.

              However, the establishment was determined to prevent Ramey from serving again. They argued serving almost two years should be counted as a four-year term. When it was pointed out Colorado courts have already ruled partial terms don’t qualify as full terms when the actual time served is less than two full calendar years (365 days x 2 = 730 days), they argued the case law might not be binding on Lakewood.

             To protect her civil rights Ms. Johnson was forced to retain an attorney who pointed out that without any case law to support the establishment’s argument, courts most likely would use the existing Colorado district court case as relevant legal precedence. Several local attornies also spoke up, as private citizens, in support of Ms. Johnson’s legal position that no matter what days were used to calculate the partial term (election day, first regular council meeting or swearing-in date) it always yielded the same result that she was two or three days short of two calendar years.

            Ward 1 Council member Charley Able pointed out if Council didn’t want to count the fact Ramey Johnson was two days short of two years, they could look at the entire four-year term and break it into the two partial terms. The first partial term, served by her predecessor Vicki Stack, was 734 days long while Johnson’s partial term was 728 days. Johnson clearly served the shorter of the two partial terms.

             Rather than repeat the mistakes of the 2090 S. Wright Street court case (where the City spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees in a fruitless legal battle with Lakewood citizens to give away parts of Peterson Park without the required vote of the people), the Council finally realized that trying to fight the legal realities would only be a further waste of time and decided to drop the matter.