Council appoints Slooten as mayor
SLYARLAKY >> The Clearlake City Council voted unanimously on Thursday to appoint Dirk Slooten as its new mayor and Russ Perdock as vice mayor.
Mayor Russ Cremer recommended the appointments and no alternatives were proposed by other council members. Cremer said Slooten had been preparing for the role of mayor for over a year.
“I want to thank the council and especially Mayor Cremer,” said Slooten upon accepting the appointment. “We’ve known each other now for quite some time and he has guided this council through some tough times.”
Cremer said he had a harder time deciding who to endorse for vice mayor. He said he valued the counsel of both Councilor Joyce Overton and Perdock, who had both served the city for years, but in the end, he thought that Perdock’s leadership was a little more widespread in the community.
“Looking at it from my perspective, I think the more you know about all of the things going on in the city — and Vice Mayor Slooten is very involved in many different things — that I have complete confidence in him going forward as mayor,” Cremer said.
Before the vote, the council said goodbye to councilor Phil Harris and hello to David Claffey, who took his seat. Notable in the time of COVID-19, Harris gave hugs and handshakes to the council members, who wear masks seated behind the dias, on his way out. Afterward Overton was sworn in along with Claffey, as she was reelected in the November election.
Earlier in the meeting, the council heard a presentation by Matt Tate, who works in business development for Retail Strategies, a company the city has contracted with for over a year.
Tate said the company had advocated for the city
at a recent virtual conference and that a dozen retailers were actively interested and looking for sites in Clearlake. He said there was “pretty good excitement” about the market in the city.
“The first couple months in the par tnership, I couldn’t get anyone to come out to Clearlake,” Tate said. “For whatever reason, the tone has changed.”