Calistoga had an election on the calendar for Nov. 3: mayor and two City Council seats. It won't happen. At a special meeting that ran barely 11 minutes on the morning of Aug. 19, the council voted to scrap the vote and hand the three open seats to the only three people who had filed.

The Napa County wine town of about 5,000 didn't have a scandal or a boycott — it had a shortage. Three seats, three candidates, no contest. A California law lets cities skip an election when nobody competes, and Calistoga used it to convert a ballot into a set of appointments, sparing the city an estimated $35,000 to $60,000. It's a small item with a large question behind it: what does local democracy look like when no one turns up to challenge it — and Calistoga is one of several California towns confronting that answer this month.

The tool is California Elections Code Section 10229 (external source, opens in a new tab). When the number of qualified candidates doesn't exceed the number of open seats, a council can hold the election anyway, appoint the candidates who filed, or — if nobody ran at all — appoint any eligible resident. The catch is timing: the decision has to be made by the 75th day before the election, a deadline that landed on Aug. 20 for this year's Nov. 3 contest.

Calistoga acted the day before the cutoff. The special session convened at 10:04 a.m. and wrapped up shortly after 10:15, the Napa Valley Register reported (external source, opens in a new tab). The reason was arithmetic: three offices were open, and exactly three people had cleared the filing bar. The city, as City Clerk Yudiana Galvan put it, "only got three nominees."

So the council reshaped itself without a ballot. Current Councilmember Kevin Eisenberg was appointed mayor; fellow Councilmember Scott Cooper was appointed to a new council term; and Lana Richardson, who sits on the city's Housing Advisory Committee, was appointed to the third seat. All three appointments passed unanimously.

The city, as City Clerk Yudiana Galvan put it, "only got three nominees."

The vote carried a built-in conflict, and the council handled it the way the rules require: because Eisenberg and Cooper were being installed in seats of their own, both stepped aside and abstained. That left three members to approve the slate — Councilmember Irais Lopez-Ortega, Vice Mayor Lisa Gift, and outgoing Mayor Donald Williams, whose term ends this year.

City officials pitched the cancellation as basic thrift. A stand-alone municipal election typically costs the city somewhere between $35,000 and $60,000, Galvan said, and there was little argument for spending it on races no one was contesting.

What lifts Calistoga above a civic footnote is that it isn't alone. Under the same statute, California cities have spent this August quietly filling council seats by appointment instead of by vote. In Los Angeles County, Bellflower moved in early August (external source, opens in a new tab) to appoint two unopposed candidates and avoid the expense of an uncontested election — the same calculation, in a city more than ten times Calistoga's size. Each individual decision is defensible on the ledger. Taken together, they add up to a season in which a growing number of local offices changed hands with no voter ever marking a box.

The appointees take their seats in the new year. For Calistoga, that means a new mayor, a returning councilmember and one fresh face — chosen, this cycle, by a three-member vote in a room that emptied out as soon as the conflicts were counted, rather than by the roughly 5,000 residents who were never asked.