A last-minute entry by a perennial also-ran means Vero Beach will, after all, have a city election in November.

Less than 24 hours before Friday’s noon filing deadline,  it appeared Mayor John Cotugno and Councilman Taylor Dingle would not be challenged in their bid for another term in office.

Had nothing changed, the city would’ve marked its first uncontested City Council election in 30 years.

On Thursday, however, former council member Brian Heady picked up the required paperwork from the City Clerk’s Office and filed it in the late afternoon.

Heady finished a distant last in his most recent campaigns, receiving 1,661 votes in 2024, and only 252 of the 5,246 votes cast in 2021.  

His entry into this year’s race means there will be an election on Nov. 4, when the three candidates will vie for the council seats currently occupied by Cotugno, who is running for a third term, and Dingle, who is seeking his second.

The election will cost city taxpayers about $32,000.

“I had no interest in running,” said Heady, who was elected to one council term in 2009 but won no other races before or since.

“But they need somebody up there who has a brain in his head,” Heady said in a phone interview. “The final straw was the insanity of wasting time on that asinine episode involving the vice mayor.”

Heady also criticized recent councils for continuing to ask City Manager Monte Falls and his undermanned staff to do more work than is reasonable.

“The city manager and his staff can do only so much, but they keep overloading them with new stuff,” he added. “It’s insane, and it needs to stop. It’s already reached the point where Monte is asking for an assistant city manager.

“These council members have all these grandiose ideas, and we need somebody up there to just say stop – stop coming up with new stuff, stop dumping more work on the city manager and his staff, and let them do what’s already on the books.”

Heady, 77, said the overburdening of city staffers, along with spending what he believes has been too much money on consultants and studies, is the driving force behind his first council campaign in four years.

But what really spurred him to run, he said, was the council devoting more than an hour at its July 23 meeting to the local Moms for Liberty group’s as-yet unproven allegation that Vice Mayor Linda Moore’s downtown bar, the Kilted Mermaid, allowed children to attend a Pride-month drag show on the premises.

“You’ve got the city attorney, city manager and city clerk sitting there, listening to this nonsense that has nothing to do with city business,” he added, “All of them could’ve been putting that time to better use.”

He said he will not seek contributions and doesn’t plan to put up signs for this year’s election, in which the top two vote-getters will win council seats.

Instead, the longshot challenger, who in past years has called council members “liars, cheats and thieves,” will let Cotugno and Dingle run on their records.

“There are only three of us running,” Heady said. “If you like what you’ve got, vote for the incumbents. If you want change, vote for Heady.”

Cotugno, who turned 77 on Monday, didn’t necessarily disagree with Heady’s campaign strategy, saying the voters have a “clear choice” as to the future direction of the city.

Chosen by council members to serve as mayor in 2022, 2024 and 2025, Cotugno said he’s seeking re-election because he wants to ensure Vero Beach “remains the vibrant, welcoming and forward-thinking community we all love.”

He also believes his professional background, previous service on the council, understanding of the community’s wants and needs, and knowledge of how the city operates makes him well-equipped to work through the challenges the city faces and will confront in the future.

Among those challenges?

“We need to balance the preservation of what make Vero Beach special with the transition into a new era of accommodating explosive growth in the county,” Cotugno said. “And we can’t accomplish these things without responsive and effective local government.”

By far the youngest of the candidates, Dingle, 29, cited his age as an asset in his campaign for re-election, especially with the city pursuing major projects that will extend beyond another two years and leave a lasting impact on the city’s long-term future.

“The council has made meaningful progress, but there’s still important work ahead,” the first-term councilman said. “Given my age, I’m in a unique position to carry forward our momentum and see initiatives through to their completion.”

Dingle first ran for a council seat in 2021, when he received only 9 percent of the vote and finished fifth in a seven-candidate race.  He ran again in 2022, getting 11 percent of the vote to finish sixth in an eight-candidate race.

Dingle finally was elected in 2023, finishing second to Cotugno in a three-candidate race in which incumbent Honey Minuse was unseated.

“While I used to wish I’d won the first time around, the truth is: I wouldn’t value this seat the way I do now had the road been easier,” he said.