A political newcomer appears to have secured a spot on the Henderson City Council as Kenia Gómez-Jimenez got more than 55 percent of the vote for the Ward 1 at-large seat, besting incumbent Sara Coffey in Tuesday’s nonpartisan municipal election.
Gómez-Jimenez got 911 votes, compared to 174 for Coffey and 525 for challenger Geraldine Champion. Clementine “Tina” Hunter got 35 votes.
The Ward 1 at-large seat was one of four contested seats on the Henderson City Council that were up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. Ward 4 incumbent Ola Thorpe-Cooper told WIZS Tuesday night that she will call for a runoff. She is 12 votes behind challenger Catherine “Kitty” Gill.
According to results from the N.C. State Board of Elections, Gill had 117 votes to Thorpe-Cooper’s 105 votes. Fred Robertson got 65 votes in the Ward 4 contest and there were two write-in votes.
“Most definite I will ask for a runoff,” Thorpe-Cooper told WIZS Tuesday evening.
The other contests weren’t as close, with incumbents Garry Daeke and Lamont Noel getting more votes in their respective races.
Noel, the Ward 2 at-large incumbent, had 1,153 votes – just over 70 percent – to challenger George Mayo’s 459 votes, just shy of 28 percent.
Ward 3 Council Member Daeke got 224 votes – 62.57 percent of the vote – to challenger Deryl vonWilliams’s 99 votes, which represents 27.65 percent of the total votes. Other challengers in the Ward 3 contests were Jason Spriggs (24 votes) and Clifford High (10 votes). There was one write-in vote.
According to the SBE website, 1,656 of Henderson’s 8,898 registered voters cast ballots – that represents a little more than 18 percent of the voters who turned out
See complete results on the N.C. State Board of Elections site at https://er.ncsbe.gov/
