After more than five months with a vacant seat, Taneytown’s City Council has selected Alex Kelly to join its five members.

Kelly, a former member of the city’s election board, said he first became interested in running for office in 2025 but intended to wait until Taneytown’s next scheduled election in 2027. When former council member Christopher Tillman resigned in September, Kelly said he decided to throw his hat in the ring for the open seat.

Kelly, who has lived in Taneytown with his family for four years, said he wants to prioritize stabilizing residents’ water rates, funding a bypass and investing in the police department, all while keeping taxes stable.

“I want to make sure the town is something that our current residents can be proud of, as well as what my kids can be proud of,” he said. “I definitely want to make sure that the town has the infrastructure to deal with any kind of growth. Whether or not we want growth … we need to be prepared for it.”

Kelly was unanimously selected from a pool of three candidates by the mayor and the City Council’s four other members. He will serve for the remainder of Tillman’s term, which ends in spring 2027. He said he’s already planning on running for reelection.

Kelly joins the council as first-term Mayor Christopher Miller has been pushing to restructure the city government and focus more on long-sought projects, such as a bypass around the city’s downtown. Right now, a slate of three council members — Rachael Miller, Harry Meade and Nick Kalinock — holds a majority on the council. The slate generally, though not always, aligns with the mayor. Rachael Miller, the mayor pro-tem, is the mayor’s wife.

Though Kelly said he generally supports the mayor’s recent policies, he’s also excited to bring more variety to the council’s perspectives. He said he appreciates how council member James McCarron often offers differing views from the slate.

“Some of the things that the mayor has now been pushing for are very much in line with what I’ve been pushing for,” Kelly said. “While I don’t take any credit for his focus on the bypass or our water rates, it’s definitely something I’ve talked to him about.”

Kelly said he thinks his professional experience managing budgets during his career in the insurance industry will help him make wise fiscal decisions for the city.

Another big topic of discussion in Taneytown has been the city’s plans for economic development. In December, the mayor unexpectedly fired Robert Jones, the city’s economic development director who had been hired in June. The mayor recently said he wants to take six months to test-run how the city’s business landscape will fare without a paid economic development director position.

Kelly said he thinks the city could go without an economic development director, and could invest the money from the former director’s salary in other places while still allocating some of it toward business-related projects. He also said he supports the council’s recent decision to pass a deferral for data centers, a move that will stop any developers from building a data center in Taneytown until the city has a way to classify these centers in its zoning code.

“I want to make sure that whatever we do is big-picture,” Kelly said. “I would leave any of the city stuff to the city employees, to the mayor, to the day-to-day. But when we look at the town holistically, year over year, quarter over quarter, do we have the right policies in place to make sure that the town can grow healthily without putting any kind of burden on the current residents?”

Kelly will be officially sworn into his position at the City Council’s March 9 meeting.

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