The Consequences

Carmi elected an unopposed mayor in 2025, lost him by resignation in October, and held a council meeting where members questioned a redacted invoice. Six prospective candidates described what they would change. That is not a surprise. It is an invoice arriving.

Monster News · 25 October 2026

CIVIC OVERSIGHT · CARMI, ILLINOIS

On Saturday morning, in a room in Carmi, six people took turns answering one question: what is the first thing you would fix?

Nobody had to be persuaded to answer it. John Bolerjack, running for mayor, got twenty-five seconds and used them on the water treatment plant. George Wood, also running for mayor, started with the books and ended at the sewers. Chula Fleming, Ward 1, wanted to know why the town cannot pay for anything. Greg Fischer, Ward 2, said he is not seeing much honesty from the council that exists. Chantell Sullivan, Ward 4, said she wants the city back at “our original roots.” Michael Hyson, one year and three months a resident, said a house divided cannot stand.

Five of the six named the money, the pipes, or the transparency without being led there. Not one of them needed the question repeated.

Nomination papers for independent and new-party municipal candidates in the April 6, 2027 election are filed November 16 through 23, 2026. Filing has not yet opened. The six people interviewed include two prospective mayoral candidates and four prospective council candidates in a city whose 2020 census population was 4,865. They are not the entire announced field: acting Mayor Doug Hays has also announced his intention to run. The filing period begins in just over three weeks.

That is worth pausing on. In our view, these interviews show residents ready to challenge the way their city is governed.

How a town ends up with one name on the ballot

In the April 1, 2025 election, Carmi elected William Stendeback unopposed after Jeff Pollard ended his campaign. Stendeback was sworn in on May 6. About eighteen months after the election, on October 5, 2026, he resigned.

The council then had a vacancy in the mayor’s office and no election in front of it. On October 13 it chose one of its own, Doug Hays, to serve as interim mayor until the election. Hays kept his Ward 2 alderman seat and kept its vote, and residents returned to that point again and again that morning: the man now running the meeting also sits on the board that votes on what he proposes.

Retaining both roles is permitted by Illinois law. Under 65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-50(d), an acting mayor who keeps the aldermanic seat votes as an alderman and has no mayoral veto. Section 3.1-40-30 expressly bars an additional vote as acting mayor. The criticism here is about concentrated responsibilities and public scrutiny, not an unlawful appointment or a second vote.

Then, on October 20, the room got company.

What the record shows the public saw

At that council meeting, residents stood up before the votes and said things that a council in a watched town would rather not hear out loud.

One described a year-long water leak at a Fairview address and a shut-off notice delivered after he had already paid what a city employee told him to pay — a process failure, he said, not a billing dispute. One argued that the city’s purchasing looks closed to outsiders — that five auto-parts stores in a town of about 4,900 should share the monthly rotation, and that the same engineering firm keeps coming back. Council members and staff disputed it: purchasing rotates monthly, they said, and everything goes to bid. One raised the Public Officer Prohibited Activities Act by number, the 75 percent ownership test and the $25,000 threshold, and said he had already put the question to the Illinois Municipal League.

And then the invoice.

The council took up a bill for Lashley & Bayer P.C., special legal services, $21,531.50. Members objected that they had been given a redacted copy. The resolution that authorized the work, they said, covered ADA and FOIA matters — not the litigation the bill appeared to describe. After extended argument the council voted to table the payment until every member has the unredacted invoice.

Read that again. Council members said they had received a redacted invoice and voted to defer payment so every member could review an unredacted copy. The meeting record establishes that request and vote; it does not establish that every member subsequently received the unredacted bill.

Chantell Sullivan, running in Ward 4, said the thing on Saturday that connects the two events: she wants a council where “everybody has a packet when they come in, and not redacted, right, as the other night.” A public body cannot govern from documents it will not show its own members, and it cannot be surprised when the public notices.

The bubble is not a conspiracy. It is a habit.

There is a version of this story that is about villains, and that version is almost always wrong.

What happens in small Illinois towns is duller than that. A council is five, six, seven people who have known each other for decades. The meetings are on a schedule nobody needs to look up. The agenda is prepared by the same office that has prepared it since before anyone in the room can remember. A question from the audience is unusual enough to be a small event. Coverage arrives when something breaks, not when something is decided.

None of that requires anyone to be corrupt. It only requires everyone to be comfortable — and comfort is cumulative. Standing for reelection stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like a formality, because it has been a formality. The incumbent’s advantage in a town of 4,865 is not money or organization. It is that the incumbent is the only person whose name the voter can attach to a face, and the only candidate the voter has ever been asked to consider.

So the body learns to legislate for the room rather than the town. Not out of malice. Because the room is what it can see.

And then the town sees something — a redacted invoice, a shut-off notice, a mayor’s chair that changes hands by council selection — and the habit stops being invisible. That is the moment the cost gets calculated. In Carmi, the six interviews on Saturday showed residents putting their concerns into prospective candidacies.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible”

John Kennedy said it on March 13, 1962, at the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress: those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

We are not quoting that to predict or endorse violence. The October 24 candidate interviews concerned peaceful civic participation. We are quoting it because, in our reading, the sentence is also about doors.

A town that closes its ordinary doors — a contested election, a packet a member can read, a bid the neighbors can win, a hearing a tenant can get — does not make its anger disappear. It sends the anger somewhere less orderly. The crowded public comment, the FOIAs that arrive on the day a record is due, the recording devices in the back row, the six candidacies on one Saturday morning: that is anger taking the only route still open to it. It is the peaceful version. It is also a warning label.

The filing period in Carmi begins in just over three weeks. Independent and new-party municipal candidates file nomination papers November 16–23, 2026, for the April 6, 2027 election. Eligible residents considering a run should check the petition, signature and filing requirements with the city clerk now; petition circulation is already underway.

Give me the trash collector

Here is the part that will annoy the people who consider themselves the responsible ones.

The usual objection to a wave of new candidacies is that the newcomers do not know how a city works. That the budget is not a checkbook, that the Open Meetings Act has rules, that a wastewater plant has a capital plan, that an ordinance is not a preference.

All true. And all learnable in a first term by anyone who reads the packet.

What is not learnable in a first term is what the town feels like from inside a house on Fairview with a shut-off notice on the door. Or what it is like to be told your limb pickup depends on a storm date you cannot produce. Or why a purchase order should not always go to the same counter. The people in that room on Saturday learned those things the way residents do: by living there and being annoyed. A credential is not a substitute for that. Often it is a shield against it.

We would rather have a candidate who has never read Robert’s Rules of Order and knows what a shut-off notice does to a household than one who can cite the rules of order and cannot tell you what the council did to the last person who asked for an adjustment. The first can be taught procedure. The second has to be persuaded that the person at the rail is a constituent.

It is the mayor today

The interim mayor’s arrangement — one man serving as acting mayor while retaining his aldermanic seat and its vote — drew public questions at the October 13 meeting. It is part of the wider argument about oversight. In our view, the larger problem is governing as though the audience will never arrive.

The audience has arrived. It has FOIA requests and a calendar and a recording device. It has six candidates and, as of this week, a filing window. It has the invoice the council tabled, and it has the votes on that tabling.

And it has the question every incumbent in White County should be asking this morning: if a town this size, with this little money and this much history, can produce six people willing to sit in that chair, what exactly is the excuse for the seat that went uncontested?

The mayor’s office and council seats will be contested in the April election if candidates qualify for the ballot. Incumbents who expect to return without a contest should take these interviews as notice: residents are considering alternatives.

In our view, the council has helped create the demand for change. The good news is that the remedy is on the calendar, in public, with a deadline, and it does not require anybody to raise a fist. It requires eligible candidates, valid petitions and nomination papers filed on time.

The room has chairs. Some of them are empty.

---

Monster News recorded the six candidate interviews at a meet and greet in Carmi on October 24, 2026. Quotations are from those recordings; they were transcribed locally and lightly punctuated, and the full transcripts are on file. Campaign descriptions — who is running for which office — are as the candidates stated them; the field is not official until nomination papers are filed November 16–23, 2026.

Records referenced: Carmi City Council regular meeting, October 20, 2026, and special meeting, October 13, 2026, both recorded and transcribed by Monster News; the mayor’s resignation of October 5, 2026, reported by WFIE and WFIW; the April 2025 unopposed mayoral election, reported at the time of the swearing-in; Illinois Election Code 10 ILCS 5/10-6(2) for the 2027 filing dates; 2020 U.S. Census population of 4,865.

Fact-check update, October 25, 2026: clarified that Hays retains one aldermanic vote and has no additional acting-mayor vote; distinguished the six interviewees from the full announced field; corrected filing-period wording. Supporting public sources: WEHT’s May 7, 2025 election report; WFIW’s October 14, 2026 appointment and candidacy report; Illinois State Board of Elections 2027 calendar, hosted by Colona; Kennedy’s March 13, 1962 address. Cover: AI-generated satirical editorial illustration; the scene and figures are symbolic.