The Great Bend City Council Monday night named former council member Mike Boys to the First Ward council seat left vacant by the resignation in January of Mike Zinn.

The council followed the recommendation of the committee selected by Mayor Mike Allison at the Feb. 6 meeting. The committee consisted of Allison and council members Vicki Berryman and Wayne Henneke.

Since the Feb. 6 meeting, the committee interviewed the applicants. The council had 60 days to fill the vacancy. 

Officials said there were five applications for the position. “We had some good applicants,” Allison said.

In the end, the committee suggested Boys. “He knows the staff and he knows how things work,” Allison said of Boys who was on the council from 1996-99.

This experience will be helpful since he is coming onto the council past the mid point of a term which started in 2015, the Mayor said.

“We encouraged the other applicants to actually run next time,” Berryman said. “We need to get some more people interested in the city.”

Zinn won as a write-in candidate in April 2015 city election with nine votes. However, he resigned the seat after he accepted a job in Manhattan.

Zinn served Ward I along with Berryman. The first ward covers the northeast corner of Great Bend east of Jefferson Street and north of Forest Avenue.