By the time you’re reading this, we’ve likely got a pretty good idea of who our new mayor and council members are going to be.
Hot on the heels of the property tax election, it feels like folks have been campaigning for one thing or another since 2018 got rolling. And while there was a bit of drama here and there, I think we’ve all managed to pull through it just fine in the end.
This council election was an especially hard-fought race, with candidates pulling out all of the stops to get out in the community, meet the citizenry and share ideas. To mayoral candidates Cecil Yates and Ginny Dickey, as well as council candidates Alan Magazine, Mike Scharnow, Sharron Grzybowski, David Spelich, Marcus Bulow von Dennewitz and Gerry Friedel, I’d like to thank all of you for having the courage to step up and offer your time and expertise to the Town of Fountain Hills. And to those of you who managed to pull in the most votes, good luck on the road ahead.
Then again, maybe I’m popping the champagne a bit too early here. There’s always a chance the council election will be too close to call, in which case we’ll be gearing up for a runoff. We’ll just have to wait and see what the final results yield!
And speaking of elections, you might have caught in this week’s paper that there will, in fact, be an election for the Fountain Hills Unified School District Governing Board.
Incumbents Judy Rutkowski and Wendy Barnard will appear on the ballot, alongside Nadya Jenkins. A fourth write-in candidate, Bob Shelstrom, will also be vying for one of three four-year terms up for election.
The holiday weekend might throw our schedule out of whack, but the plan is to introduce these candidates to the community in the Sept. 5 edition of The Times. If all goes well, that will leave us four weeks to conduct a Q&A before ballots go out in the mail in early October. So if you were expecting the election season to quiet down for a bit around town, you’re out of luck.
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You may have also noticed that there are very few letters this week. I figure folks are waiting to see about those election results before jumping back into the conversation. Then again, it was a month with five Wednesdays and a whopping 16 individuals hit their monthly allotment of two letters already, which probably had something to do with the sudden drop in submissions.
With so many weeks these past several months sporting anywhere from 30 to 50 letters, I almost didn’t know what to do with myself last week.
From the property tax to the town council election, thanks to everyone who has kept the conversation going. I know we don’t always agree with each other, but we here at The Times enjoy giving folks a place to be heard – so long as they follow the guidelines, of course.
Our varying opinions and ideas are an asset, and they’re exactly what we need for Fountain Hills to keep moving into the future.
