Monday, August. 12 — After a very lengthy and difficult discussion tonight, the Falls Church City Council voted 4-2 to petition the Arlington Circuit Court to call for a special election to fill the seat on the Council vacated by the resignation last week of Caroline Lian. They will ask the court to call the election for Nov. 5, the same day as the U.S. presidential and other federal elections.
      Because of the compressed time frame involved in the certification process of qualifying candidates for the ballot and printing those ballots ahead of the commencement of early voting, anyone seeking to run in the special election, if OK’d by the court, would have to have secured about 125 valid petition signatures and filled out all the necessary paperwork by August 30, barely over two weeks away. 
      For that reason it is not certain the court would authorize the election, and so the Council also determined that it will need to receive a positive answer from the court by close of business this Friday. Failing that, it also determined that it would convene in a special meeting next Monday to withdraw the request and instead proceed to advance a process of an appointment to fill the vacancy for a year until the end of what had been Liam’s term in November 2025.