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Wednesday, Nov. 04, 2009

Dublin voters elect two new council members

Dublin voters were sure to elect at least one new face to City Council on Tuesday. Instead, they elected two.

Newcomers Jerry Davis and Gerald Smith finished among the top vote-getters in the race to fill the three at-large seats on the council. Davis got the most votes, with 803. Incumbent Phil Thacker won re-election, finishing second with 736 votes. Smith had 733.

One of the at-large seats was open after Councilman Matt Hatchett, who is running for state House District 143, did not seek re-election. The other seat had been held by longtime incumbent Junior Scarboro, a 25-year councilman, who finished fourth with 665.

“We had a lot of good people running,” Scarboro said. “It might be that the people think it’s time to get some new people in there.”

Davis, 58, said his campaign got organized early behind a theme of “representing a new generation of leaders.”

“A lot of people think of why things can’t be done. I like to think of why it can be done and it will,” he said.

Smith, also 58, said like so many cities, Dublin faces financial issues after being hit hard by plant closings and job losses.

“We need to really promote ourselves to get us through this crisis,” he said. Curtis Edwards Jr., another political newcomer, got 502 votes.

Also Tuesday, voters filled an at-large seat on the Dublin Board of Education vacated by incumbent Scott Thompson.

Rodney Carr, administrator of the Middle Georgia College Dublin Campus, won with 752 votes to Frank Newman’s 609. Results were delayed by a glitch with a new server on the state computer in the Laurens County Probate Court office. The city used the county’s touch-screen voting machines, but totals had to be hand-tallied using printouts from the machines.