LEWISTON – Voters will select a new mayor on Feb. 27, councilors agreed Tuesday.

The city will pair the vote to select a replacement for Lionel Guay with a ballot to replace Pettingill Elementary.

Guay announced his resignation last week, blaming stress from accusations of inappropriately touching a teenaged receptionist at his accounting firm. He was found not guilty of the charges in September, but said his health and his family’s health had suffered.

Scheduling the vote at the end of February should give the city plenty of time to prepare for the election but still be early enough in the month to satisfy the Lewiston School Committee, City Administrator Jim Bennett said.

The school committee had hoped to schedule the vote for $22 million bond for the new elementary school as early as Feb. 13, according to Councilor Stavros Mendros. That would put the school on schedule for a September 2009 opening, he said.

Councilors can shorten the time petitions for the mayor’s seat are available from 30 days to 10, and he urged the council to do that.

“Then the vote would be two weeks earlier and the schools have two weeks more time to prepare,” Mendros said.

Mendros said he also wanted to get a new mayor in place quickly, and that might not be possible if too many people run. The city’s charter requires the winning candidate to get at least 50 percent of the vote. Too many candidates could slice the vote into too many portions, forcing a run-off election between the top vote-getters.

“That leaves us without a mayor until April at the earliest,” Mendros said.

Three people have said publicly they would seek Guay’s seat: City Councilor Normand Rousseau, former Lewiston police Chief Larry Gilbert and perennial candidate Charles Soule.

But Bennett said the city staff needs extra time to prepare the ballots for the election. Staff is expecting good voter turnout for the vote, and has decided to use the city’s optical ballot counting system.

“We need an extra couple of weeks to create the ballots and have them printed,” Bennett said. “If we were hand-counting the ballots, we could just print them ourselves. But we expect we’re going to get more than 1,000 people out to vote, and hand-counting is difficult when you get that many ballots.”

Candidates for mayor’s seat can pick up nominating petitions at 8 a.m. Wednesday, and they have until Jan. 5 to collect 100 signatures to secure a place on the ballot.

The Multi-Purpose Center will be the only polling place for the Feb. 27 ballot.