Congratulations to Galveston Mayor-Elect Joe Jaworski, who won a majority of the vote in a five-candidate race.
“I think our message was one of energy and it was one of progress in Galveston,” Jaworski said. “I think people are tired of thinking of Galveston as a wounded city, and I think, in our campaign, they saw something that showed a clean, powerful, connected Galveston for the future.”
Jaworski beat four challengers, including one who dropped out midrace, according to complete but unofficial results.
Jaworski’s closest competitor, Betty Massey, earned just less than 25 percent. Massey on Saturday night congratulated Jaworski and promised to remain involved in shaping the island’s policy and recovery.
Mayor Pro Tem Danny Weber earned 20 percent; Bill Quiroga earned 2 percent, and Greg Roof, who stopped campaigning in March, had 1 percent.
Jaworski said his first acts as mayor would be to clamp down on the pettiness and hostility that bubbled up among sitting city council members.
“I expect a first meeting that puts away the rancor, a first meeting that follows an agenda, and a first meeting that prioritizes our city’s appearance and infrastructure and economic well-being … before any personality contests, before any petty disputes,” he said. “And, every minute of every city meeting, we’re going to be spreading hope and optimism.”
I’m delighted by this. Jaworski’s an ace, and I think he’s exactly what Galveston needs now. My best wishes to Mayor-Elect Joe Jaworski. Other Galveston County results are here; there will be several runoffs for City Council there. In the other race I was following, Chula Ross-Sanchez fell short in her race for City Council in District 6, losing to Diana Puccetti by a 51-49 margin. The Chron and Martha have more, while Stace reports on results in his area.
There will be a runoff for the open SD22 seat.
Republicans David Sibley and Brian Birdwell will meet in a runoff — date to be set by Gov. Rick Perry — for the open state Senate seat in Central Texas.
Sibley led in the special election voting with 45 percent of the vote, followed by Birdwell, with 36.5 percent, Democrat Gayle Avant, with 13.3 percent, and Republican Darren Yancy, with 5.2 percent.
[…]
The election pitted Sibley, a former Waco mayor and state senator who’s been lobbying in Austin for the last decade, against Birdwell, a survivor of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon who is now a conservative Christian motivational speaker living in Granbury. Avant will retire after the end of the current school year after a career as a political science professor at Baylor. And Yancy, a salesman who lives in Burleson, has now lost two shots at the seat. He was on the ballot against Averitt in the March primary, coming up far behind even though Averitt didn’t campaign.
The winner of the special election runoff will serve until January. The winner of the general election — Averitt or a person to be named later — will run for the chance to serve starting then.
Sibley won in all but three of the district’s ten counties, but two of those — Hood and Johnson — turned out relatively big votes. The former senator got walloped in Hood, where Birdwell got 3,625 votes to Sibley’s 819 (in percentages, that’s 68 to 15, in Birdwell’s favor, with the rest of the votes going to the other two candidates).
Here was Burka’s preview of that race. It’s highly likely that Averitt will withdraw from the ballot after the runoff, and that the winner of that runoff will be selected as his replacement for the November election. The Democrats will then get to pick someone as well, as they had no one file for the March primary.
BOR has some Austin-area results, including the good news that Tom Musselman, father of BOR’s Karl-Thomas Musselman, was elected Mayor of Fredericksburg.
Finally, on a personal note, congratulations to my cousin-in-law Bill Metzger for his election as Dallas County Community College District trustee. Way to go, Bill!
Pingback: Will Averitt not withdraw from the ballot? – Off the Kuff