I have not checked the rules on this recently, but over a year ago, the procedure was:
Once all founders of a town were deleted or banned, the highest level remaining member of the town (did not matter if resident or counselor) had to make a request through the support website (NOT the forum), giving the town details, and petition to be promoted to Founder.
Which a GM would then do, therefore restoring the viability of that town.
Posting here on the forum would not gave any effect on that regard.
If you are not the highest ranking remaining player you can still make that petition, but I suspect that it would still be the highest ranking survivor who would be promoted to Founder, not you.
If that player is also inactive, repeat once he/she get deleted.
If you are NOT a resident of the town you mention, there is no point for you petitioning on their behalf.
As long as the town still has 1 non-banned resident, that resident would be promoted to founder.
Once the last resident exits the town, it instantly becomes a Ghost town, which you can then found as if it were an empty town spot (requires 300 $ and 80 Energy).
If you re-Found a Ghost town within a few hours of it becoming so, you will recover the shops with the exact same items they had (verified when my town migrated last week, to a larger town next to us which had just become a Ghost town).
If you re-found a Ghost town after a while, it will still have all the same building levels, but the contents of the shops will then be re-rolled randomly (verified several weeks ago on a nearby town which went Ghost town, then was re-founded about a week later).