Weed City Council

Three of Weed's five City Council seats are up this cycle, but only two candidates filed for them: Marie Gates-Green and sitting Mayor Darrell W. Parham. With two candidates for three seats, both are effectively elected outright -- and Siskiyou County's own "Offices going to Ballot" document confirms this race is genuinely printed on the ballot as-is, not cancelled and filled by council appointment instead.

This person would hold one of Weed's five City Council seats for a 4-year term running Dec. 4, 2026 - Dec. 6, 2030: city ordinances, the budget, and land use in a Siskiyou County city of about 2,862 people (2020 Census), incorporated Jan. 25, 1961. The Council is elected at-large; the Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem are chosen annually by the Council from among its own five members, not separately elected by voters, per the city's own official site.

Two candidates for three seats is unusual, and this dataset checked carefully whether it meant the race had actually been cancelled under California Elections Code Section 10229, which lets a city council directly appoint candidates instead of holding an election when the field doesn't exceed the number of open seats. It hadn't: the county's own "Final Siskiyou County Candidate List" is a planning document that includes every office up this cycle, contested or not, so its inclusion of Weed's race alone doesn't settle the question. The county's separate, later "Offices going to Ballot" document does -- it's the authoritative list of what's actually printed on the ballot, and it drops every unopposed-incumbent race countywide along with the structurally similar Town of Fort Jones Town Council race (also undersubscribed, and actually cancelled to appointment). Weed's race survives onto that list unchanged, which is the county's own affirmative confirmation this election is genuinely happening as printed.

One seat has no candidate at all: with only two people running for three openings, the third seat will need to be filled separately after the election -- most likely by Council appointment, following the same Section 10229 process this dataset checked to rule out for the other two seats, since state law generally allows appointment once an election has run its course and a vacancy remains. That process (and whoever eventually fills it) is a Dec. 2026 matter outside this ballot's scope.

Weed's own Municipal Code (Title 2, Chapter 2.50, per the city's own City Clerk page) sets local election procedures, but the city's site does not itself publish candidate filings or results -- Siskiyou County Elections administers the vote. No official source found for exactly why only two of Weed's five sitting or prospective Councilmembers filed to keep or seek a seat this cycle; the county's documents record who filed, not why others didn't.

Marie Gates-Green

Darrell W. Parham

Candidate background for this contest is thin but essentially symmetric: beyond Parham's independently confirmed status as sitting Mayor, neither candidate has any independently verifiable occupation, platform, or civic record beyond their shared "Business Owner" filed ballot designation. Weed has no dedicated local newspaper of its own; siskiyou.news returned an access-blocked response to a direct site-search fetch, the Mt. Shasta News's site search was paywalled, Siskiyou Daily News could not be reached at all, and Ballotpedia carries no page for either candidate. This session's separate general web-search budget was already exhausted before this jurisdiction's research began -- a documented access gap, not anything being withheld.