Last night on the east central Mesabi Iron Range, Mary McReynolds-Pellinen was sworn in as a Virginia (Minn.) City Council member.

The city council appointed her to fill a seat left vacant when Larry Cuffe was elected mayor in the last election. McReynolds-Pellinen was the fourth highest vote-getter in the at-large council race in that same election.

Typically, the council appoints the next highest-vote getter in this situation, especially if the candidate demonstrated statistically significant support, which McReynolds-Pellinen had done.

You might recall my fit of righteous indignation over this issue last November. A slew of comments and a Mesabi Daily News editorial suggested that McReynolds-Pellinen should not be appointed to the council because of a position on the PolyMet mining project that was largely imagined by paranoid mining advocates. It seemed to me then that city fathers were treating McReynolds-Pellinen differently than they had previous council runners-up in similar situations.

Well, on a 3-2 vote yesterday morning a council subcommittee recommended appointing the “next highest vote-getter.” The council approved the plan at the evening council meeting, swearing in McReynolds-Pellinen before she took her seat for the duration of the meeting.