Raymore council agrees to place ordinance on agenda to consider earlier, shorter municipal candidate filing window

Raymore City Council members directed staff to place an ordinance on a future agenda to consider changing the city's candidate filing period to align with a 2021 state statute that moved the municipal filing dates earlier and shortened the filing window.

The change discussed Monday would move the start of Raymore's filing period into December and reduce the local filing window from the current 28 days in the city code to the 21 days prescribed in the state statute (the statute establishes filing beginning the seventeenth Tuesday before the April election and closing on the fourteenth Tuesday). Council members were told the change would remove roughly one week, or about 25% of the current filing period.

Staff member Fearborn told the council that, because Raymore is a charter city, the city is not required to adopt the state timetable but may choose to do so. Fearborn said the state moved the dates in 2021; before that the filing period in statute ran from the fifteenth Tuesday to the eleventh Tuesday before the April election. He said the legislature has discussed and proposed further changes several times since 2021 but none gained lasting traction.

Council members spoke briefly about regional practice: Council member Burke noted the school district had moved to the earlier dates and had only incumbents file in recent cycles; others said Raymore is now an outlier and aligning with neighboring municipalities would put the city on the same schedule. Some council members expressed concern that the legislature might change the dates again in a future session and that the city would then have to consider another change.

Mayor and councilors signaled a consensus that staff should prepare an ordinance to appear on the upcoming council agenda for an up-or-down vote; no formal motion or vote on the ordinance itself was taken at the work session.